Article March 9, 1968 Issue

True Evidence

MARY BARNES

True evidence is the manifestation of God, or Truth. In true evidence Soul proclaims its beauty and harmony, divine Life manifests its ceaseless action, divine Love expresses its tender presence. True evidence is therefore eternally good, pure, and holy. Since it includes no taint of evil, it does not need to be, indeed cannot be, changed or improved in any respect. That which is faulty, imperfect, or discordant must be deemed false testimony, no matter how real it may seem to be. It is the expression of false mentality, and because of its spurious nature it should not even momentarily be entertained either as factual or powerful.

Christian Science is dynamic in its teaching that all material sense testimony is delusive. Through spiritual sense alone is reality discerned and determined. The importance of rightly discriminating between truth and error can thus be seen. As mankind is surrounded by a great variety of phenomena of one sort or another, the Christian Scientist strives to keep his thinking at such a spiritual level that he is instant in his rejection of false testimony whenever and wherever presented and alert to replace it with true concepts stemming form the divine Mind.

Any material evidence of inharmony is but a perversion of the already reigning spiritual fact. The task of the Scientist should not be arduous but joyous because it is an awakening to the presence and reality of good and the consequent acknowledgment of the unreality, the utter nothingness, of good's seeming unlikeness termed evil. This spiritual discernment is a vital and precious quality, essential for effecting the reversal in human consciousness of erroneous sense testimony. We all need to exercise this prophetic capacity in the light of the Glossary definition of "prophet" found in the textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Here Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes: "A spiritual seer; disappearance of material sense before the conscious facts of spiritual Truth."^{Science and Health, p. 593}