Article July 28, 1956 Issue

BANISHMENT OF ERROR

KATE HOLLAND PATTON

The Christian Scientist finds a strong impetus toward spiritual healing and confidence in the permanence of that healing through the study of the Bible and the works of Mary Baker Eddy. In our great textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mrs. Eddy writes (p. 391), "Banish the belief that you can possibly entertain a single intruding pain which cannot be ruled out by the might of Mind, and in this way you can prevent the development of pain in the body." Of all words that one might use to clarify this sentence and stabilize its substance, surely none could introduce the idea more perfectly than the word "banish."

We note in the sentence that it is "the belief" which is to be banished. Here is pointed out the way to permanent freedom, for everyone is at liberty to decide whether helpful or erroneous beliefs are to be entertained in consciousness. In the last analysis, then, we see that it is not the return of pain which causes concern, but the return of the belief that pain and disease are real, that they are self-constituted entities, liable to manifest themselves, at any moment with power to come and go of their own volition. Mrs. Eddy gives further helpful counsel along this line in the textbook (p. 381), "Let us banish sickness as an outlaw, and abide by the rule of perpetual harmony,—God's law."

The fact that fear is a seeming cause of sickness and suffering is accepted in Christian Science, and this premise is beginning to be believed quite generally. Every student of the Bible knows what to do with that false accuser, fear. He is to cast it out, and this he does through love. We can banish fear by persistently turning away from binding thoughts of self and by expressing love to all mankind. Even though the remembrance of a painful experience and the fear of its return may try to appear in one's consciousness, these suggestions can find no way to enter and no space where they can be manifested if our thought is filled with love. Such fears are indeed the outlaws which our Leader tells us to banish, and happy is he whose vision is so spiritually clear that no outlawed thoughts can becloud it.

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