Most people, including Christian Scientists, occasionally visit a business associate, friend, or family member in the hospital.

Calling on patients is Christian and compassionate. The visit is intended to support them, to encourage, to be neighborly. Or we may sometimes have a moral duty to see that a friend or relative choosing medical treatment gets the best attention possible.

As we realize man's true nature as entirely spiritual—a basic point in Christian Science—our hospital visits need incur no fear or pressure.

Such visits can bless when we free our thought from aggressive pictures of ailing physicality. This mental defense, this clarity of thought, not only helps us but can touch and benefit everyone we come in contact with.

How?

The only place sickness or injury can seem to exist is in human consciousness. And that's the only place we can conquer them, because Christian Science explains all mortal experience as subjective. Acknowledging this fact, we can resist and thereby ameliorate any inharmonious physical appearance or process, even though no specific Christian Science treatment is being given. Sickness is neither God-created nor God-ordained. Knowing the truth of being, we find that mortal beliefs can't project into our thought, because we reject them as spurious. Affirming the true, spiritual perfection of God and His expression, man, never separated from Him, we spiritualize our own thought and uplift those we contact in day-to-day life, including those we visit in the hospital.

So we work out within our own consciousness problems we may encounter in visiting friends or family in the hospital. We can confidently reject the belief that illness and other forms of evil are concentrated there. Mrs. Eddy writes, "Evil has no reality. It is neither person, place, nor thing, but is simply a belief, an illusion of material sense." ^{Science and Health, p. 71;}

We can silently affirm that, no matter where we are, God governs us and others—that man is in God's care. Mrs. Eddy writes of this divine care in her spiritual definition of "Japhet," Noah's son: "A type of spiritual peace, flowing from the understanding that God is the divine Principle of all existence, and that man is His idea, the child of His care." ^{ibid., p. 589;}

Christ Jesus indicated God's loving care in his metaphor of the good shepherd. He said: "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand." ^{John 10:27–29.}

We can enhance our peace of mind by knowing that God governs all man's functions because in truth man is spiritual, not material. Christian Science helps us maintain a clear recognition of this fact and provides evidence of it in human life. The visiting Christian Scientist can pray along these lines, but as a general rule he does not give Christian Science treatment without request or to those under medical treatment.

There are other specific points on which the Scientist can correct his thought by turning from material images, smells, and sounds to the spiritual truth of being. For example, one can know that man is energized by God, not by material forces. God maintains man and all he is comprised of—the spiritual qualities and substance of God Himself. Man's being is well, normal, whole. His substance and activity are totally Godlike and determined by God.

Most important of all, the Scientist can know there is only one authority over man. That authority is God. Man lives under His law; God has already created man and pronounced him perfect.

The Christian Scientist will keep a loving attitude not only toward the one he is visiting, but also toward those in attendance. Whatever one's religion or profession, in truth everyone is God's child, His loving expression, desiring to do God's will and seeing only what God knows.

A medical nurse once told a Christian Scientist whose relative she was attending through a difficult illness, "I've learned a lot about love from you!" Misunderstandings about Christian Science and its Founder, Mrs. Eddy, were alleviated in this case—not so much by discussing Science, but by living love and intelligence.

As we spiritualize our own thought on the basis of Christian Science—as we walk in Spirit—everyone is helped. We contribute to an atmosphere where others will be spiritually benefited in ways material medicine can't offer.

Thus we fulfill our Christian duty—scientifically.