Editorial June 2, 1945 Issue

Faith, Negative and Positive

Paul Stark Seeley

Our faith is sometimes positive, oftentimes negative. Says Mary Baker Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 368), "When we come to have more faith in the truth of being than we have in error, more faith in Spirit than in matter, more faith in living than in dying, more faith in God than in man, then no material suppositions can prevent us from healing the sick and destroying error."

Here Mrs. Eddy exposes the negative faith so prevalent in the thinking of mortals—faith in error and matter, faith in dying, faith in mortal man. We shall advance our spiritual progress if we will frequently examine our thought to ascertain in what degree we are entertaining these negative forms of faith, and earnestly strive to supplant them with positive, childlike faith in God and spiritual man. Nothing less is real faith.

Christian Science displaces the negative, mesmeric sense of faith in evil with this true faith in God, good, that is born of spiritual understanding. Daily let us deny that any phase of negative faith can abide in our consciousness, amalgamate with our being, or link our thought to mortal mind, its concepts or beliefs. The reason, we shall know, is that the only real faith we can have is the faith that is God-given, Love-bestowed, the faith that is the bond by which Mind holds within itself its own, and forges with understanding the oneness of man with the Mind that is his Ego. Of true faith Mrs. Eddy writes (Science and Health, p. 297), "It is a chrysalis state of human thought, in which spiritual evidence, contradicting the testimony of material sense, begins to appear, and Truth, the ever-present, is becoming understood."

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