"Let Truth uncover error"

The practice of Christian Science includes the denial of any reality in sin, disease, mortality, and death through understanding the true idea of God as infinite, perfect Mind, and man as His sinless, healthy, harmonious expression. In this healing work some particular phase of habitual wrong thinking in the patient's thought is often uncovered and destroyed, and the healing thereby facilitated.

Sometimes students have, however, overemphasized the need to uncover some specific error in order to accomplish a healing, and have given more attention to uncovering error than to the realization of the spiritual truth of God's allness and man's oneness with Him, the discernment of which confers Truth's healing power. Well-meaning workers have been known to dig deep with the spade of inquisitiveness, or to pry with the chisel of suspicion, into a patient's past. Such an attitude often discourages or frightens the patient, and avails nothing in building up his faith and trust in God and His saving Christ, which is the real purpose of Christian Science practice.

The scientific way is not to be in any wise indifferent to the uncovering of error, but to let the uncovering come in the way of Truth's ordering, and not through a personal inquisition accompanied, perhaps, with personal condemnation. It is right and necessary for an individual to recognize his mistakes and correct them. But to pick out some particular error in his experience and jump to the conclusion that it is, for certain, the one from which subsequent troubles have evolved is a grave mistake. Such human reasoning often leads one sadly awry.

How presumptuous it would be to assume that because a patient gambled on the races, or lost his temper, in 1930, these mistakes resulted in his having rheumatism in 1940! If his derelictions had been more recent and more serious, it would still be a mistake for mere human reasoning to link them unqualifiedly with some present physical difficulty.

Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, defines the one right course thus: "Let Truth uncover and destroy error in God's own way, and let human justice pattern the divine" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p.542 ). Truth and its omniactive, error-exposing forces must be trusted and expected to uncover and destroy any contributing error in God's own way—wisdom's way— not in the human mind's often unwise way.

The healing is God's work to do, and omniscient Mind impels every step to aid in its accomplishment. This fact the Christian Scientist needs often to remember. His work is, through spiritual sense, to realize what God is, and is doing, and man's inherent spiritual oneness with the All-in-all. The understanding of these basic facts operates as a law to free the patient, and to bring to light and destroy every phase of error, be it fear, hate, self-will, or sin, that might claim to be an obstruction to the healing.

The basic error is always mortal mind, and the Christian Scientist should always strike at this error by knowing that since God is the one infinite and immortal Mind, there can be no mortal mind. Its seeming presence is a negation, a fiction. It is of first importance to see that every effect of the basic error, be it sin, sickness, war, death, or a material sense of creation peopled with materially-minded mortals, is as erroneous as the basic error itself. No effect of a false cause can lift itself above the low, truthless level of its cause. Oftentimes when confronted with mortal mind's argument of organization, multiplication, extension, and aggressive mortal mentalities, this important evil-deflating fact is lost sight of. If we unsee the root error, mortal mind, sufficiently with spiritual truth, the remote and immediate cause of the wrong condition is handled.

For every look we take at error, we shall do well to look longer and much oftener to the living Christ. Mrs. Eddy saw, and wished us to see, that it is not by digging in the mire of material beliefs that we find and demonstrate Truth's healing power, but by looking to the redemptive power of eternal Love and man's unity therewith, realizing that it will turn and overturn with the wisdom and thoroughness that no amount of mere human effort can attain.

The Gospels say of Christ Jesus that "he knew their thoughts;" and Mrs. Eddy says on page 95 of Science and Health, "We approach God, or Life, in proportion to our spirituality, our fidelity to Truth and Love; and in that ratio we know all human need and are able to discern the thought of the sick and the sinning for the purpose of healing them." Farther on she says, "This kind of mind reading is not clairvoyance, but it is important to success in healing, and is one of the special characteristics thereof." Here is something for every Christian Scientist to ponder well.

In the ratio of our spirituality are we able to discover the thoughts of the sick and sinning for the purpose of unseeing all that is untrue, and so heal them. Not by mortal mind inquisitiveness, though cloaked with human sincerity, not by digging in the dust bin of material experience, not by prying into forgotten pasts, but simply by growth in spirituality, and the spiritual discernment that is coincident therewith, can we see the errors that may need handling in order to accomplish the healing.

Every one of us is God-endowed with the ability to know the thoughts of those who seek help from us for the purpose of aiding them. This ability let us daily claim as ours, as an essential faculty of our true selfhood, which cannot be obscured, dulled, or stolen away.

Many a case has been quickly healed, though no habitual error was handled. Other cases may be healed by some uncovering in the patient's thought and his relinquishment of the error without perhaps discussing it with the practitioner. Again, healings often take place when some obstructive error is discerned by the practitioner and reversed by him, but with no apparent need for discussing it with the patient.

The eighty-page chapter on "Christian Science Practice" in Science and Health is the longest chapter in this volume. Its frequent and studious perusal will reveal to the individual the correct method of scientific practice as nothing else can do. It shows how best to deal with particular types of sickness and emphasizes that the all-essential need for quick healing is genuine spirituality, expressed in the Mind of Christ.

This never to be lost sight of fact is simply stated by Mrs. Eddy thus (ibid., p. 365): "If the Scientist reaches his patient through divine Love, the healing work will be accomplished at one visit, and the disease will vanish into its native nothingness like dew before the morning sunshine."