"If God loves me, as you say He does, why is He making me suffer so? What have I done to make Him punish me this way?" These questions were put to a Christian Science practitioner by one who was lying on a bed of pain, seeking help for the first time through Christian Science treatment. The practitioner, with compassion, said quietly, "God is Love. He doesn't know anything about suffering. You are suffering from false belief."

To one lacking the understanding that God and His ideas alone are real, such a statement may seem ludicrous. But to someone turning to Christian Science for healing, just this glimpse of the magnitude of God's love for His idea, man, can be enough to set him free.

The practitioner was listening to God for guidance, and what she said to the patient proved to be exactly what was needed. For a moment the patient appeared shocked. Then her facial expression softened, and in great humility she looked up through her tears, smiled, and said, "Of course. Love does not afflict."

In a few moments the woman sat up, left her bed, and walked unaided across the room to the waiting arms of the practitioner. This was the first time she had walked in almost a year after a fall that had resulted in a broken hip and related complications. Christ, Truth, accomplished in one moment of spiritualized consciousness what surgery and medicine had not done over a long period of time.

Exactly what had brought about this healing? The practitioner did not manipulate, prescribe medicine, or suggest further surgery. The healing came about naturally through the operation of divine law and scientific prayer. This prayer is not asking God to heal a sick person, but is the affirmation of Truth. It is based on the perfection of God and man's oneness with Him. This prayer, or Christian Science treatment, annuls error's claim to be the condition of man and establishes the ever-present fact that the real law of being is just and good and spiritual. Truth acts as law, with all the power of God behind it. Spiritual law has full authority; it cannot be reversed by mortal so-called laws. Since all true law impels moral action, obedience to its demands for regeneration and self-immolation establishes harmony and peace, the evidence of man's oneness with God, right where inharmonious conditions seem to be. God's laws are available and always ready to destroy whatever denies ever-present good.

When the woman we are talking about surrendered self-pity and self-condemnation to the humble recognition of Love's presence and power, she found that she was not suffering from effects of a broken hip but from the false belief that man can break some law of God and be punished for it. When her thought was awakened to the truth that pure Love has no taint of hatred, and that she was indeed eternally embraced in the arms of Love, she was released from her lifelong belief that God punishes His children—and from the hip injury. The error being over, the suffering that accompanied it vanished too.

What part did the practitioner play in bringing about the healing? First she challenged in her own thought the suggestion that this woman was a suffering mortal—or a well mortal, for that matter—and took her stand for health on the biblical account of man's true, spiritual nature: "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. ... And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." ^{Gen. 1:27, 31.} No accidents here! "Accidents are unknown to God, or immortal Mind, and we must leave the mortal basis of belief and unite with the one Mind, in order to change the notion of chance to the proper sense of God's unerring direction and thus bring out harmony," ^{Science and Health, p. 424.} writes Mrs. Eddy in Science and Health.

Nobody can fall and hurt himself if he does not accept the mortal belief of falling, of accident. Can anyone fall out of God? Can idea fall out of Mind? No! Man's substance is indestructible and eternally free from dislocation or breakage. Wholeness is a quality of God; and man's wholeness, as God's spiritual reflection, is established in divine law.

Divine Science, the Comforter that Christ Jesus promised, is bringing to this age the permanent banishing of suffering. The primary purpose of Science is the healing of sin, the root of many of humanity's ills. Wrong thinking can be just as much sin as wrongdoing. One of the much-loved hymns in the Christian Science Hymnal relates,

After Jesus had healed a man who had been crippled for thirty-eight years, he said to him, "Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee." ^{John 5:14.} This brings out clearly that wrong thinking and action bring penalty. But when sinful thoughts are replaced with God's sinless ideas, error is no longer a part of consciousness, and there is no more penalty to pay.

The belief that God is vengeful is one of the most insidious beliefs held to by mankind; it has kept humanity in bondage through the ages. What a sin to picture God, Love, as a god of wrath! How utterly inconceivable that God could be Love and hate at the same time. Science and Health tells us: "Human hate has no legitimate mandate and no kingdom. Love is enthroned." ^{Science and Health, p. 454.} In order for evil to be real, God would have had to include it in His perfect, indestructible creation. This would be impossible, for error has only one power: to destroy itself.

Error seems to come to us in four stages. First it comes as aggressive mental suggestion. Sometimes this appears as our own thinking, other times as someone else's. If we accept the suggestion, error goes into the second stage, belief. The third stage, suffering, leads to the fourth, death. But evil need never go beyond the first stage. We have the power to stop it there. Whatever guise it takes, we have a choice. We can refuse to accept it. If error finds no response in us, it has no power to do anything, for we have denied it presence and power in the only place it can seem to have them, in our own thinking.

If we believe ourselves to be mortals, capable of doing wrong, we are denying our real selfhood as children of God, perpetuating evil, and making that real which can never be real except in belief. We must understand that man is Godlike, not a miserable sinner. Whatever the error seems to be, there is no consciousness to know it, no basis for it to stand on, and no truth to support it. It has no reality. It never happened.

In humanity's present stage of unfoldment, suffering is salutary only in that it forces us to face up to the moral demand and heal sin as well as sickness. Without the discomfort error brings, we might be so content with our present way of thinking and doing things that we would have no incentive to make changes that bring spiritual growth and progress. Mrs. Eddy's words reassure troubled humanity: "The very circumstance, which your suffering sense deems wrathful and afflictive, Love can make an angel entertained unawares." ^{Science and Health, p. 574.}

Love lifts us into the atmosphere of Truth and Love, where health and holiness are found to be natural to man. There we see what God has created: perfect man, His beloved. What a joy to behold spiritual man radiant with the beauty of holiness, resplendent in the sunshine of his Father's love! No sin stains the purity of his robes of righteousness. His abilities and capabilities are unlimited. He cannot fall from grace, for Love everlastingly supports him.

It is false belief about man and life that suffers and dies. When false belief is relinquished, you don't have to suffer. The Comforter is here and is saying to us all, "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." ^{John 8:31, 32.}