Article October 11, 1969 Issue

The Power of Right Reasoning

RALPH W. CESSNA

"For right reasoning," Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "there should he but one fact before the thought, namely, spiritual existence."^{Science and Health, p. 492;} Here the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science gives a basic rule for its practice, the acceptance, understanding, and application of which is essential to its healing work. Adjustment of each of our human problems comes only in the proportion that this divinely inspired advice is heeded.

Such a radical requirement may seem startling at first to those whose thinking has been educated along other lines. It has been commonplace for mankind to assume that there are two kinds of existence, the heavenly or spiritual and the earthly or material. Every healing accomplished in Christian Science through spiritual means alone disproves this strongly entrenched human concept. But this dualism is liable to remain dormant in consciousness and in some degree influence experience if it is not firmly and perhaps periodically disavowed.

The erroneous view is stated, of course, in the allegory of Adam beginning in the second chapter of Genesis, the traditionally accepted theory that man was made perfect but that he sinned and fell into a state of materiality and condemnation. But the true account, as Christian Science points out, still told in human terms or symbols, is found in the first chapter. Here man is made in God's image and likeness, and, understandably, God finds this man and all that He has made to be very good. The false argument about creation is corrected as it is seen that there is no room for the suggestion that God did less than a perfect job of creating.

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