To think that reading a book can result in physical healing and can make sin seem absurd stretches human credibility. The first time I sought healing by reading Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mrs. Eddy, I didn't know what to expect. But within a short period of time I was healed of a serious disease. Not long after that a quick healing of an injury I had received on the football field took place.

I tried to understand how such healings happened, based upon the reading of a book. At first I speculated it was a matter of mentally holding an image in thought of what a normal, healthy organism would be like. And yet I knew that in the cases where I had been healed I hadn't even thought about such things. Then there was a brief period of time when I tried to go back to previously held theological beliefs for an explanation. I tried to conceive of God knowing me much as one human being knows another. And then God—as one influence among many—would be thought of as working a change in me.

But I soon saw the insufficiency of that concept, because it led to a limited view of God that allowed some to suffer, commit evil, or be sick, but not others. It was then that I took another look at Christ Jesus' healing works and what he said about such healing. He had utter confidence that God was ever present, unvarying, and immediate in His answer—as when he said just prior to raising Lazarus from the sepulcher: "Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always." ^{John 11:41, 42.} I began to see that there was a link between healing and individual willingness to respond to a higher idea of God.

We can begin to understand better why this link is so powerful when we think of it in terms of there being one cause—God. Science and Health says: "There is but one primal cause. Therefore there can be no effect from any other cause, and there can be no reality in aught which does not proceed from this great and only cause. Sin, sickness, disease, and death belong not to the Science of being. They are the errors, which presuppose the absence of Truth, Life, or Love." ^{Science and Health, p. 207.}

It is the very presence of God—divine Truth and Life—and of man as Truth's and Life's expression, which brings healing in Christian Science, as we understand these spiritual realities and admit them into our thought. The book Science and Health explains God and man in such a way that we can learn how to pattern our own thought and life after the spiritual ideal.

In Christian Science healing, an essential and profound disbelief in evil begins to break the hold of sin or disease—a disbelief so deeply rooted that it will literally enable us no longer to pattern thought or action after images of evil, disease, or hate. It is not an uncommon experience in Christian Science for men and women to come to a point in their lives when they know they can no longer tolerate the jealousy, fear, ignorance, or sin that earlier might have seemed justified. They literally come to know God as Love so clearly that they cannot consciously indulge in Love's opposite. And in a parallel way, that's how disease is overcome— through a deep, spiritual understanding of God as infinite Life without a single iota of disease or discord. It is this scientific knowledge of God in its detail that brings the dawning understanding of man as the image of God.

Deepest spiritual understanding isn't gained immediately, of course. Sin and disease are constituted of the basic material belief of man's alienation from divine Love. But we can begin today to refute whatever would deny our direct and immediate access to God. Science and Health, with characteristic realism, describes the basic challenge: "The refutation of the testimony of material sense is not a difficult task in view of the conceded falsity of this testimony. The refutation becomes arduous, not because the testimony of sin or disease is true, but solely on account of the tenacity of belief in its truth, due to the force of education and the overwhelming weight of opinions on the wrong side,—all teaching that the body suffers, as if matter could have sensation." ^{Ibid., p. 396.}

What the book offers is the explanation of the unbreakable relationship of God and man and of the divine law that breaks the tenacity of false belief. This helps us to free ourselves from evil through a spiritual understanding of God as infinite good and of man—our true spiritual selfhood—as His expression, or image and likeness. What the book does for its readers is summed up in the experience of one who had suffered for twelve years in spite of extended medical treatment. "I was healed through reading .... It was a clear case of transformation of the body by the renewal of the mind. I am perfectly well at the present time." ^{Ibid., p. 628.}

There is certainly amazing technology today, and sophisticated material methods abound to treat human ills and difficulties. Under such circumstances in an increasingly materialistic period, it does require considerable willingness and an unbiased attitude to investigate the claim that reading a book about Christian metaphysics can heal. And, for longtime readers of the book, there's an honest challenge that arises when a reader has become so familiar with the words of Science and Health that the ideas behind the words might be missed. But there isn't a material treatment, technology, or method that is as close or as available as our individual knowledge of God and His healing law. Nor is there anything quicker to turn to in need than the spiritually scientific prayer that Christian Science explains.

Immediate recourse to God hasn't changed since Christ Jesus showed sufferers their spiritual way of escape from sin and disease. And though the healing of illness and overcoming of sin may receive wide attention when there is discussion of Christian Science, it's really this immediacy and reality of God that lies at its heart. If our strongest desire is to understand God and feel the closeness of divine Love, then that's the deeper urge to which Science and Health speaks.

Michael D. Rissler