The truth of being is that God, the Mind that conceives all, maintains His spiritual universe intact and complete, without possibility of error. An individual not knowing this is sometimes disheartened by the belief that he has made an irrevocable mistake in the past and that he will be unable to escape the ill consequences of this error. His fears are based on the inaccurate premise that creation is material and subject to mistakes.

In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy writes (p. 555), "We lose our standard of perfection and set aside the proper conception of Deity, when we admit that the perfect is the author of aught that can become imperfect, that God bestows the power to sin, or that Truth confers the ability to err." God, the one Mind or Principle of the universe, governs with faultless intelligence. Mind's divine idea, man, expresses the forever unfolding of God's flawless creation.

As Mind's transcendent spiritual universe becomes tangible to consciousness blessed by the enlightenment of Christian Science, what appears to be a material creation is recognized to be only a mistaken sense of the true cosmos. Whenever aggressive mental suggestion tempts us to believe that error is taking place in our daily lives, we should replace the suggestion of defectiveness or restriction with the truth of spiritual perfection and infinitude. Then error will vanish from our human experience.

In the Old Testament we read that Jacob had tricked his father into bestowing the blessing upon him instead of his elder brother, Esau. Jacob's burden of guilt and fear of the consequences to himself and his household weighed heavily upon him. Then there came an experience which illumined his consciousness with a glimpse of God's infinite love and care, and he said (Gen. 32:30), "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved." He also beheld his brother in a new light through spiritual vision. The result of Jacob's enlightenment was the harmonious solution of his problem. His mistake was redeemed and tenderly forgiven.

In human experience we suffer from a mistake until through spiritual insight it is uncovered and completely forsaken. If it is disclosed to us that we are making a mistake, we must correct it. To continue in error, taking the attitude that our human conduct is unimportant, since there is no mistake in divine reality, will never result in harmony. If we knew the proper sum of two numbers in mathematics and yet deliberately put in a wrong figure as the sum in our problem, we could never expect to solve it. Our human behavior must obediently conform to the divine ideal.

One of the Tenets of Christian Science reads (Science and Health, p. 497): "We acknowledge God's forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin and the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as unreal. But the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts." To persist in a mistaken course when we know it is not in conformity with divine Love indicates that we are still giving credence to evil. The unerring justice of God's law will allow us no peace or satisfaction in such a fallacious procedure. Our mistake or sin, itself, punishes us by setting us at odds with the harmonious rule of divine Science. It is not pardoned until corrected.

That a mistake has been made which has caused one to be misplaced is a frequent argument. The suggestion may present itself, for example, that one has located in the wrong city, in the wrong part of town, or is in the wrong business concern. Lifting thought above these arguments, which relate only to a human sense of life, we see that actually man can never be out of place, since Mind is omnipresent and man exists forever in Mind as its infinite expression. A realization of the truth of God's omnipresence, of the uncircumscribed nature of good, came to Joshua in these words (5:15): "The place whereon thou standest is holy." When we realize that God's perfect plan is always unfolding for man, that in divine reality all is as it should be, and that God's ideas are not misplaced in Truth, the supposition that a mistake has been made will disappear. The true idea concerning place will appear in our human experience as either a change of place or a proper manifestation of harmony and progress in our present situation.

How may we deal with the suggestion that one is the blameless victim of the mistakes of another? Since there is just one all-harmonious Mind, which man reflects, the belief that there are many minds with conflicting, erroneous opinions is a false sense. Whether the argument presents itself that we are suffering from our own mistakes or the mistakes of another, the argument is without foundation in truth. It is based on an unsound premise and concerns a hypothetical material creation, which does not exist. In reality no mistake has ever occurred, whether one's own or that of another. Man has always existed in Mind, governed by God's unerring law.

We are cautioned in the book of James to make no mistake about the perfection of God and His creation (1:16, 17): "Do not err, my beloved brethren. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." How alert we must be never to admit for one moment that an irrevocable mistake has been made! If we agree to such a belief, we are laying our human experience open to an endless succession of mistakes, for we are consenting to the suggestion that evil is real. If our premise is not correct, we can never reach an accurate conclusion. Our premise must unfailingly be the in-finite and perfect Mind, which forms all, includes all, and never errs. Then the false suggestion that an irredeemable mistake has been made will be found to be false, and God's faultless unfoldment of good will be seen in our experience.