Editorial November 3, 1956 Issue

FINDING ERROR TO BE NOTHING

Helen Wood Bauman

The basic teachings of Christian Science include the facts that God being All and good, evil is nothing; Spirit being substance, matter is nothing; health being real, sickness is nothing; abundance being true, poverty is nothing. Mary Baker Eddy says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 334), "You must find error to be nothing: then, and only then, do you handle it in Science."

In order to demonstrate Christian Science, the student must awaken to the fact that Truth itself and not a person reduces error to nothingness. Our responsibility as scientific Christians is not to ignore error but to adjust our thinking to the full meaning of nothingness. In Science, Truth is a synonym for God; and this name implies the fact and reality of spiritual being. God, Truth, is good; hence His image, man, is good. Man's experience must be good, for he reflects or images forth only that which is true —found in Truth. A mortal— suffering, sinning, often feeling the pinch of poverty, and finally submitting to death—is not man but his opposite, a misconception of man. To rid oneself of a misconception, or false thought, one must cease to honor that thought as having reality or existence. True consciousness cannot entertain misconceptions, and when one demonstrates true consciousness as his real and only selfhood, he inevitably finds himself expressing less of the false. Eventually the entire misconception of being will disappear.

In mathematics the fact that two plus two equals four has already reduced to nothingness the error that two plus two equals five, even before the school child arrives at a correct conclusion concerning the equation. The child's problem is solved when he sees as nothing the error that two plus two equals five; and the misconception disappears from his thought. And so it is in demonstrating Christian Science. When an error of injustice or limitation, pain or disease, fear or threat of death, appears to thought, it must be seen as nothingness rather than as an actuality which we must reduce to nothing from something. Our comprehension of the error's nonexistence will determine the speed with which it departs.

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