Article April 16, 1966 Issue

Mistakes Are Unnecessary

CAROLYN B. SWAN

The Bible reveals God as "a God of truth and without iniquity"^{Deut. 32:4;} and man as His image and likeness (see Gen. 1:26). Christian Science is in full agreement with these facts. In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy writes, "Truth never made error necessary, nor devised a law to perpetuate error."^{Science and Health, p. 183;} The popular belief that mistakes are a necessary evil should be unmasked and banished as a lie. Mistakes, like all claims of error, are unnecessary. God did not create error and He is the only creator.

God forever endows man out of the perfection and power of His allness. Then the ideal man cannot make mistakes, nor does he advance from the basis of mortal mind and then learn to become perfect. Man is now, always has been, and ever will be, a witness to perfection. There is no opposite to God, called evil mind; nor is there an opposite to man, called a mortal. When Christ Jesus commanded, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,"^{Matt. 5:48;} he informed us that freedom from error of every sort is more than a possibility. Perfection is lawful, demonstrable, and real.

The importance of claiming one's God-given dominion over mistakes may sometimes be obscured by the seeming triviality of mistakes. Businessmen who work with figures, stenographers who take dictation and type, musicians who perform music, housewives who cook and sew, cashiers who make change—all these and others whose work requires exactness and accuracy may be tempted at times to believe that mistakes are unavoidable and sometimes even ineradicable. But the agreement with the false belief in the inevitability and irradicability of mistakes and their ramifications may lead to the excusing of mistakes or to the covering up of them.

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