A phase of evil which the Christian Scientist needs to see the nothingness of is the claim which sometimes suggests that while a healing of sickness, sin, lack, or inharmony has been accomplished through Christian Science, the healing can be reversed. To reverse means to undo, to turn the other way, to change completely. The claim of evil in its entirety, it is helpful to see, is a claim of reversal.

Evil claims to reverse the supremacy of God, good, with the lie that evil is more powerful than good. It would reverse the fact that man is spiritual, healthy, holy, and harmonious with the lie that he is material, often sick, sinful, and discordant. If a mortal, Mr. A, son of Mr. and Mrs. B, is sick, evil says there is a reversal of the spiritual fact that man is the immortal son of God and forever expresses health and harmony.

Mr. A, let us say, turns to Christian Science for help. A practitioner, fearless of evil's claim, realizes something of the spiritual fact of the unreversibility of God, and of His man's superiority to evil and disease. As a result Mr. A is healed. With his spiritual understanding of God and man the practitioner thus meets the challenge of evil that it has reversed the spiritual fact. Instead of error reversing what is spiritually true, as it would claim to do, what is spiritually true reverses error, but is never reversed. It is unreversible.

Says Mary Baker Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 442), "Neither animal magnetism nor hypnotism enters into the practice of Christian Science, in which truth cannot be reversed, but the reverse of error is true." The truth, realized by the practitioner for Mr. A was not that Mr. A can be made from a sick mortal into a well mortal, perhaps later to become sick again. The truth realized was that man is not mortal at all, but spiritual and immortal. His life is not in matter but in Spirit, God, and is irreversibly harmonious.

Mr. A may become elated when he finds himself physically free. If error ever suggests that his healing can be undone and the ailment re-appear, what then? Is he going to say and think that error has succeeded in reversing truth? So to think would be to do just what error would have him do. It would be averring, in effect, that whereas he was a sick mortal, Truth drove off the sickness for a time, and he was a well mortal. Now error has come back, and he is a sick mortal again.

If the fear of the disease is overcome, and the utter nothingness of it is clearly realized in the first instance, the suggestion of a reversal cannot appear. But if that is not accomplished and one is tempted to believe there has been a reversal, his need is forthwith to turn without reservation to the unreversibility of God and His work, to realize that "whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it" (Eccl. 3:14). God cannot be undone; neither can man, who is one with the unreversible I AM.

In other words, the way to meet and master the lying suggestion of reversal is to become more conscious of the eternal unreversibility of God, the All-in-all, and of the eternal unreversibility of man as God's continuous manifestation. One should joyously acclaim the spiritual fact that because his individuality is forever Mind's idea, Love's image, Life's reflection, his life, health, and harmony are for all eternity unreversible spiritual facts, caused and perpetuated by the forces of divine omnipotence. Never has his individuality fallen away from its high estate as God's witness; never can the expression of God be reversed in its God-constituted being. God being unreversible and unchangeable, these qualities likewise always characterize His manifestation, man.

Man's status is never that of a sick mortal, who changes to a well mortal, then by reversal to a sick mortal again. Those concepts are all in mortal mind, the basic error, and you and I gain nothing, but, in the degree we accept any of them, lose our vision of the intactness of God's kingdom.

The serpentine suggestion of reversal, sometimes wearing the name of defeat and frustration, is never known or feared in God's universe. God cannot be undone or changed. No more can man, His son. What God constitutes, He perpetuates; and mortal mind, God's lying opposite, cannot enter into, alter, or reverse His work in one instance, or in a second instance—tagging it a reversal. Because error may knock a second or third time at the door of thought is no reason for giving it credence. Repetition of a lie does not lessen its falsity. As error, it is as impotent and as unrelated to man in the second as in the first instance. The allness of God and His manifestation remains intact, and man is safe and secure therein, never lapsing from his spiritually true status because he is forever established and maintained therein by his omnipotent Parent.

Mortals are often like automobiles, which are made to go forward, then into reverse, then forward, and perhaps again into reverse. But as the spiritual idea of Life, the Christ-idea, is accepted and realized, we see that there is no retrogression or reversal in the divine order, and that God-impelled progression is the forever mandate of divine law.

The divine power that nullifies disease or sin, and thus produces a healing to evidence something of the verity of being, continues actively to operate to protect and perpetuate its work. It is entirely proper in Christian Science treatment to reverse the lie of reversal, to realize that the Word declared is God's word, that it is spoken with divine authority. This Word goeth forth to accomplish that whereunto it is sent of God, and error cannot contest or reverse it. God is unreversible, and His reflection, man, shares his Father's unreversibility. The eternal unreversibility of Truth is individualized by man. Against this verity error's claim that it can afflict man, then be overcome, afterward to appear through forces of reversal is silenced by the fact of man's perpetual oneness with the never-to-be-reversed I AM.

Paul Stark Seeley