A widespread belief that keeps people from the worship of God is that He knows of human want and woe and does nothing about them. Students of Christian Science can't go along with this belief.

This Science shows clearly that divine Love and mortal error are incompatible. God, good, is infinite, All, and anything unlike Him has no substance, no real existence.

What, then, are sin, disease, want, and woe, and where do they come from? When Shakespeare wrote, "We are such stuff/As dreams are made on," ^{The Tempest, Act IV, scene 1;} he touched upon a truth that Christian Science explains and expounds. The whole of mortal existence— mortals, mortality itself with its pleasures as well as its pains—is a dream of the erring material senses. A dream seems real until one awakes from it; but good or bad, a dream is never anything more than illusion.

The waking dream of mortal existence is sometimes as distressing as a sleeping dream; the remedy is the same—to wake up! St. Paul reminds us, "Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." ^Eph.5:14;

Christian Science enables us to awake to the great spiritual realities of being and by doing so progressively to bring into our present experience better health, supply, and activity. This awakening is mental, spiritual. A verse in the Christian Science Hymnal rousingly calls us to recognize reality:

Jesus appeared in the human dream, but his Christly selfhood knew only the living truth of man's perfection as the child of God. Christliness gave him the power to dispel unreality for others, to heal their sickness and sin, and to raise them from death. Jesus broke the dream presentation of the material senses—the dream that began, according to the myth of Genesis 2, with the falling of a deep sleep on Adam. Christ Jesus, through his ascension, showed us the way to awake from this dream.

The suffering so often produced by the dream of life in matter spurs us into waking up, but the more excellent way is the salvation to be found in divine Science, which reveals the perfection of every man's real selfhood. Thinking they were strangers to Science, I once greeted as newcomers a couple who attended the branch Church of Christ, Scientist, of which I was a member. But they shook their heads. "We used to come," they said, "but we left. Now we've come back because of trouble." Woes can be a blessing in disguise if they prod us into seeking wakefulness from the sense dream; comfort in matter offers no such incentive.

At one time I sought a complete rest from pressures and problems at a seaside resort, where I did nothing but eat and sleep. At the end of my stay I was not rested; on the contrary, I felt leaden-heavy, dull, and listless; but I'd learned a lesson—that slumber and inactivity do not give true rest. As Mrs. Eddy reminds us, "The consciousness of Truth rests us more than hours of repose in unconsciousness." ^{Science and Health, p. 218;}

Man is God's reflection, inseparable from Him, and because God does not sleep or dream, neither does man. Many Christian Scientists have received sudden illumination of a passage in the Bible or Mrs. Eddy's writings as awakened spiritual sense casts brilliant light on it and opens up a new interpretation and deeper understanding of familiar words. May it not be that what we call genius is evidence of an awakened perception of some aspect of divine Truth, Love, creative Mind?

Continuous activity in expressing the God-derived qualities of compassion, joy, intelligence, humor, kindness, courtesy, in everyday life, can be potent in dispelling the dream of the senses for oneself and others. Sin and suffering can be healed because they are only phases of a waking dream—shadowy illusions, however real their seeming. Only by understanding their illusory nature can their unreality be demonstrated and their baneful effects be banished. "Entirely separate from the belief and dream of material living," writes Mrs. Eddy, "is the Life divine, revealing spiritual understanding and the consciousness of man's dominion over the whole earth." ^{ibid., p. 14 .}