Good Is Natural

We advance by accepting the naturalness of good. Because God is good and God is All, good is natural. It is natural because there is nothing else. It characterizes all that is in God's universe. These points are central in the revelation of Christian Science. If we believe that good—expressed as liveliness, intelligence, health, or whatever—must be manufactured or contrived, we're not going about demonstrating Christian Science in the best way.

We may too often bog down our advancement by approaching difficulties with a negative viewpoint, as though limitation, poor health, misery, are more natural than their spiritual opposites, freedom, health, and joy. By challenging this unnatural approach we can demonstrate the spiritual truth of God and man more spontaneously and scientifically, and so move ahead.

Take the case of someone struggling with a chronic ailment that may not have made its exit even after months of conscientious prayer. The temptation may be to believe that the problem and its attendant discomfort are more natural than health and dominion. It's not hard to move from that point into trying—perhaps desperately—to get good to come to us, or to become bigger. But prayer or treatment doesn't produce good; it uncovers it as present where the error seemed active.

Good doesn't have to be multiplied, moved, or expanded. It's natural, and it's all, and it's present. It is the normal condition of man and our actual environment. Protection and security are not something God's idea must engineer. They are natural conditions of the manifestation of God, good.

When we examine discordant beliefs from a spiritual point of view, we quickly discover their unnaturalness. And once we've done this, we deal with them more confidently. From a material position, it may seem odd to claim categorically that man is spiritual, maintained, fed, and clothed by God. To accept such spiritual truth may seem an unnatural or bizarre thing to do. However, from the spiritual point of view, to which Christian Science introduces us, lack, struggling, inadequacy, are unnatural, odd, strange, unreal. The naturalness of spiritual abundance accepted into our thought will emerge as a natural consequence as good in our experience.

Christ Jesus is our example. We're encouraged as we see from a spiritual vantage point that his life and works were not unnatural or miraculous or far-out but the inevitable outcome of the Christ, Truth, which he exemplified. His understanding of infinite Spirit made lack unthinkable for him. Good, which is entirely spiritual, was so natural to him that healing was straightforward and immediate. Anything less than total health must have been untenable to him, and he proved this on behalf of sufferers who came for his help.

To Mrs. Eddy, the initiative was with good; the power was with good. She knew that the outcome of whatever challenged us would be determined by good, by God. She writes of Christ Jesus, the most spontaneous healer ever: "It was the consummate naturalness of Truth in the mind of Jesus, that made his healing easy and instantaneous. Jesus regarded good as the normal state of man, and evil as the abnormal; holiness, life, and health as the better representatives of God than sin, disease, and death. The master Metaphysician understood omnipotence to be All-power: because Spirit was to him All-in-all, matter was palpably an error of premise and conclusion, while God was the only substance, Life, and intelligence of man." ^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 200;}

It is mesmerism, the bogus claim of the naturalness and inevitability of evil, that would obstruct healing and our enjoyment of concord and abundance. It's good, really, that has the last say and the only say—not error or evil. So why not let good have the last say right now, and on that basis at once throw off our beliefs of illness or unhappiness? Whatever is spiritually natural is immediately demonstrable. Whatever is spiritually unnatural is immediately invalid, absent, and nothing. Good is not going to be any larger tomorrow; it's infinite now. Trouble is not going to be any less tomorrow; it's entirely unreal now.

The work we have to do is to acknowledge the healing operations of the Christ. When we're spiritually solving a problem for ourselves or another, we're not of ourselves doing the healing—we're witnessing the Christ doing the healing, bringing out the naturalness of good and outweighing unnatural evil.

Joseph, abandoned in a pit, sold as a slave, falsely accused, may have been tempted to believe that evil was as natural as it apparently was to his jealous brothers. But he no doubt maintained that good, not evil, was natural, for he proved this so convincingly. This conviction carried him above the turbulences of his life and placed him where he could illustrate the naturalness of good to others. He said to his brothers, "Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive." ^{Gen. 50:20 .}

Good is supreme now because it is natural; error is nonexistent now because it is not. Basing our lives on this blesses us and others.