Editorial October 15, 1979 Issue

Replacing beliefs with truths

GEOFFREY J. BARRATT

Replacing beliefs with spiritual truths: the simple explanation of the application of Christian Science in healing. Treatment could be called an exercise in replacement. It involves dropping material beliefs about God, man, and the universe, discarding any sense of them as finite and physical. And putting in place of those beliefs the truths of Love's universality and Spirit's omnipresence.

Truth always overrules beliefs. Beliefs are fictive, illusory elements of a nonreal mind—mortal mind, a mind that seems to believe in discord, disease, evil, and matter. Spiritual truths derive from immortal Truth, God. When we face beliefs with scientific facts—and our week-by-week living is based on those facts—beliefs must retreat. Beliefs are not merely less powerful than truths. They have no actual power—except that which erring human reasoning may attribute to them. Divine facts have total authority. The more clearly we see these points, the more effectively and quickly we can prove that beliefs are never really locked in combat with Truth, can never rise in rebellion against Truth, can never have any being in the allness of Truth.

To heal from the basis that disease is a belief and not the truth of being is to heal as Christ Jesus did. It was the Master's realization that God, Truth, is the Father—the only cause—of us all that established his reputation as the Saviour. His life and work show the way in which Truth saves us from a mistake, the mistake of believing man is carnal and matter is actual. The Christ is the activity of Truth in human thought, leading it step after step to give place to eternal Mind. The Christ makes possible the replacing of beliefs with truths. The human mind cannot of itself drop its beliefs about God and man and accept the scientific truth of all things. Without the Christ, human thought would have nothing coming to it to show the way out of its beliefs, nothing to show that the divine consciousness is the only genuine consciousness.

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