Article March 18, 1939 Issue

"Fan"

INEZ FIELD DAMON

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE thinking involves constant separation of error from Truth — the divorcing of oneself from the first, the allying of oneself with the second. One may not be responsible for the thoughts which come to him, but he is responsible for the acceptance and entertainment of them. Thoughts which do not come from God, good, are evil suggestions to be dismissed; thoughts which do come from God are spiritual truths to be retained.

The process of separation may be likened to the threshing of wheat, whereby the chaff is blown away and the grain is retained. One method of accomplishing this has been by the use of a fan. Hence the apt definition of "fan" given by Mary Baker Eddy on page 586 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures": "Separator of fable from fact; that which gives action to thought."

We may do well to consider some of the more common fables which should be separated from spiritual facts in our daily thinking. There is the fable of present effects caused by error in the past. While denying the power of error in the present, one may still be entertaining the conviction that his suffering is the result of error's power in the past. It makes no difference whether one thinks of the error as having occurred in his own experience or in that of an ancestor, the fact remains that, if error is now nonexistent and powerless — as Christian Science declares—it has always been so. One cannot suffer for something which never actually occurred; neither can he dread a recurrence of it in the future. That cannot recur which never occurred! To see this clearly is to dismiss all beliefs of heredity.

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