"... we should go to a patient with the feeling that he is well and we want to show him that he is well." This is part of the instruction given by Mrs. Eddy on the subject of quick healing, as recorded by one of her students. His record continues, "She told us that when she had healed instantaneously she had lost sight of the personality and realized only the presence of the spiritual and perfect." ^{We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, Second Series (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1950), p. 23 ;}

In Science and Health Mrs. Eddy writes, "Perfection is gained only by perfection." ^{Science and Health, p. 290;} Approaching this same point from many angles throughout her book, she repeatedly makes clear that in Christian Science healing we start from spiritual perfection as the present existing fact. We cannot heal by starting and staying with the imperfect—even with a belief in the imperfect—and expecting to change it into its opposite. Mrs. Eddy's instruction is in line with Christ Jesus' words, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." ^{Matt. 5:48;}

Human mentality is apt to be a busybody. It wants to feel it's doing something on its own, stirring up and adjusting things more to its liking. Sometimes its intentions are destructive. More often perhaps it aims to improve things; it decides that a body, a business, a marriage, a community is wrong and it will put these right. The efforts of the human mind may have some successes; but too often these successes are short-lived, because they proceed from the impossible basis of attempting to make perfection out of imperfection.

The practice and demonstration of Christian Science start from the action of divine Mind and what divine Mind knows of its creation. Divine Mind, being infinite and perfect, knows only good, only infinite perfection. In divine healing we help the patient to recognize his present perfect health, his present perfect substance and functioning, as these are known to divine Mind. Starting from this recognition, human thought ceases its struggle to be an independent actor, now making us sick, now well; it yields instead to divine Mind's assertion of present and eternal perfection.

Admittedly, the statement of Christian Science healing methods, written or spoken, contains many references to disease or other evils as false beliefs, false claims, illusions, dreams, and so on. The use of these terms might seem to give a degree of reality to imperfection that then needs to be corrected. This is by no means the intention. To tell an invalid that he is completely well may be more than he can swallow at one gulp. But if he begins by seeing his condition as a false belief, an illusion, a lie about him, he may soon be ready for the further step of seeing he is not really ill at all. The use of these terms has merely provided stepping-stones across a river that might have seemed too wide to cross with a single leap of thought.

But one does not set up house on a stepping-stone. If a patient lingers too long with the thought that disease is a false belief or illusion, disease may become as menacing to him in this form as when it was thought of as solid reality. He must be encouraged to move on as quickly as possible to the recognition that disease is wholly unreal, not even a false belief, because divine Mind, man's only Mind, never entertains a false belief or an illusion.

Similarly, although the practitioner may speak of a false claim or belief to get the patient's thought moving and prepare it for the next step, the practitioner needs to be quite clear from the start that only perfection is present. He does not come to a mortal person to put a diseased body right; he comes, seeing only an individual expression of God. Then practitioner and patient together recognize the eternal fact of present perfection, of perfect health and wholeness already and always present without damage or decay, disfigurement or deformity.

The evidence of the physical senses may deny perfection, but Christian Science depends on the evidence of spiritual sense, of divine Spirit and its wholly spiritual creation. In a court case whole volumes of false evidence may be presented, but it doesn't make the accused guilty. Nor does evidence of innocence, when presented, change a guilty man into an innocent man; all it does is to reveal the already existing innocence of the accused. This is what happens in Christian Science healing: the false evidence of imperfection, of disease, is dismissed by the eternal fact of man's inviolable health.

But how can recognition of perfection exercise active healing power? Spiritual perfection includes infinite newness, infinite freshness, action, and activity. It is not static; it is dynamic. Only mortal thought thinks of perfection as static. Mrs. Eddy writes of all-acting divine Mind, "Without Mind, man and the universe would collapse; the winds would weary, and the world stand still." ^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 106.} If mortal thought had its way, this is indeed what would happen; but under the control of divine Mind, man and universe, winds and world, express tireless healthy action, moving from glory to glory, from perfection to perfection.

Every healing in Christian Science demonstrates to a degree this eternally active and inviolate perfection of God's man and God's universe.

Peter J. Henniker-Heaton