If we are having some difficulty in healing or being healed on a spiritually scientific basis, there may be something we yet need to recognize. There is an essential aspect of the teaching of Christian Science that needs to be understood and identified—Life's allness and the nothingness of anything unlike Life. The recognition of this spiritual truth heals sickness and wrongdoing.

If Life's, or God's, allness is factual, why need we heal human distress? In Mrs. Eddy's words: "Why do Christian Scientists say God and His idea are the only realities, and then insist on the need of healing sickness and sin? Because Christian Science heals sin as it heals sickness, by establishing the recognition that God is All, and there is none beside Him,—that all is good, and there is in reality no evil, neither sickness nor sin." ^{Retrospection and Introspection, p. 63;}

To truly recognize the allness of divine Life is to neutralize the claim that something can exist that is unlike it. The recognition of the infinitude of God heals the belief that sickness and error are real, and such belief is—essentially—all that can be (or need be) healed. No matter how aggressive a diseased condition appears to be or how clinging some unethical tendency may seem, it is never more than mortal belief.

Neither you nor I can conceive of any woeful condition that does not depend for its claim to reality and presence on the assumption that good is finite. By taking away this hypothesis through applying to it our scientific understanding of God's infiniteness the trouble is proved to be an impossibility. In other words, healing occurs.

Our genuine recognition of the truth that all that is real is Mind and its expression exposes the vacuity—the hollowness—of error's claim to have a foothold in reality and to be able to project itself in human experience as virus or violence. This recognition of Mind's allness can heal instantaneously because it has its roots in divine consciousness, in Mind's consciousness of its own perfection and omnipresence. That which is derived from Mind carries with it the irresistible power of Mind. Before it all physical malfunctioning—ranging from headache to a claimed unhealable condition— must retreat.

The recognition of God's allness has back of it the unchallengeable authority of divine law. Christ Jesus' recognition of the nature of God was so vivid, so precise and dynamic, that he knew his relationship with Deity to be as natural and close as that of a son to a father. He said on the occasion of raising Lazarus after his four-day period apparently in the grip of death: "Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me." ^{John 11:41, 42;} The Master's authoritative words to Lazarus—"Come forth"—expressed the authority of divine Life's unchallengeable, always provable infiniteness.

Demonstrating the potency of the recognition of reality is within the capacity of any who are willing to cease recognizing as valid the chaotic and destructive suggestions of the physical senses that God is either limited or nonexistent and that man is mortal, fragile, destructible.

The scientific appreciation of the boundlessness of God, or good, is absolutely central in the teachings and practice of Christian Science. This healing system cannot be well understood and applied without our conceding its primary premise: the endlessness of the Supreme Being and its ideal expression, man and the universe.

On the other hand, our admission of this central feature of Science equips us to heal metaphysically. And the possibilities of this healing extend beyond the correction of ailments to playing a part in helping to heal social, political, and economic ills. The workings of Science are the same in all instances—namely, the replacement in our thought of gross misconceptions of God and man with divine actualities.

Diseases and disasters are not actualities external to mortal thought but are mesmeric states of that thought induced by animal magnetism. Because they are so they can be dispelled by the God-empowered realization of the supremacy of God.

Because she is the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science and its greatest exponent, Mrs. Eddy speaks with great authority and leadership on this matter. She assured a group of Christian Science teachers and practitioners: "Animal magnetism, hypnotism, etc., are disarmed by the practitioner who excludes from his own consciousness, and that of his patients, all sense of the realism of any other cause or effect save that which cometh from God. And he should teach his students to defend themselves from all evil, and to heal the sick, by recognizing the supremacy and allness of good. This epitomizes what heals all manner of sickness and disease, moral or physical." ^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 364.}

To the extent that we recognize the supremacy of good, God, the only cause and effect, we approach metaphysical healing with assurance. We approach it, not tentatively, uncertainly groping for merely nice comforting thoughts, but as inspired Scientists who have a conviction of applying divine law with divine authority. God's allness is already established, is eternally the predominant fact of being, and we can prove it in increasingly effective healing.

Geoffrey J. Barratt