It is generally acknowledged that thought is externalized. One's thinking is expressed on one's body or in one's affairs. Look into a person's face, and you can often tell whether he is depressed or joyous, friendly or grouchy. Listen to someone talk on the telephone, and you can frequently determine whether he is tense and under pressure or poised and in command of his position.

The condition of a person's attic, storeroom, or closets can be a reliable gauge of his thinking. When a woman was describing a relative as possessing an inflexible, routine-oriented mentality, closed to everything progressive, clinging to old methods in the handling of her affairs, I was led to ask, "How's her attic?" "Full!" was the response. "You never saw such an array of junk. She won't throw out a single useless item." Wasn't this a vivid description of her relative's thought as well as of her attic?

It is most important for us to spiritualize our lives by clearing out our thinking. In belief, erroneous thoughts stay in our mental homes until discarded. Ignoring error does not remove it. Nor will going to a distant place do so. When will we get down to work and clean out our storeroom and closets, weed out the unnecessary accumulation of hoarded possessions and useless articles? When thought impels us to!

Through Christ, or Truth, we can face, eliminate, and then replace cluttering beliefs—erroneous, negative, limiting concepts, which attempt to hide our true, spiritual individuality and restrict our progress—with the right idea of God and man. A wrong, inharmonious activity cannot reassert itself if the mental errors giving rise to it are cleared away with the truth of man's flawless being as the idea of infallible Principle.

Knowing that healing sickness depends on changing thought, a Christian Science practitioner of my acquaintance used to speak of "abnormal retention in thought." This was her term for the mental state that clings to erroneous thoughts. She told me of several healings that resulted when the abnormal retention of a mental error was overcome.

The abnormal retention in thought of anything ungodlike contributes to discordant bodies and inharmonious affairs. What is ungodlike? Here are just a few of the harmful undesirables: prejudices, unfaced fears, disappointments, unfounded opinions, self-willed outlinings, self-justification, misunderstandings, a sense of pressure and tension, rankling injustices, uncorrected dislikes, unhealed tendencies and animosities, entrenched old methods, and also "my way of doing things." We can well let go of any of these as unworthy and useless.

A good housekeeper does not ignore dirt. She does not allow it to accumulate but disposes of it to keep her house immaculate. Correspondingly, a willing, alert, and open-minded person does not overlook error and allow it to build up. Nor does one who is honest justify a mistake or a wrong stand he has taken. Self-justification does not get rid of error but allows it to pile up.

If a practitioner I have in mind discerned a wrong thought in a patient she was helping, she made certain that to herself the error appearing to handle her patient was unreal. She was careful not to indulge in it or allow that error to handle her. Her willingness to correct errors of thought precluded their lodging and developing in her consciousness. Hers is a good attitude to take toward errors we see in ourselves or in others.

We are admonished in Christian Science to hold only good in thought, to hold firmly to the truth of being. The glorious fact is that each child of God reflects God-bestowed dominion over his own consciousness. Therefore we can think what is right for us to think when we need to think it. We do not need to acquiesce in or accept error's suggestions when they clamor for admission. Tenacity does not rest with evil but with good, with spiritualized consciousness. We have power from God to hold good in thought! Mrs. Eddy thus clarifies this truth: "Know, then, that you possess sovereign power to think and act rightly, and that nothing can dispossess you of this heritage and trespass on Love. If you maintain this position, who or what can cause you to sin or suffer?" ^{Pulpit and Press, p. 3;}

It is true now that God is good and the producer only of good. Everything that really exists—that has presence—is good. Error, which exists only in the realm of belief, never reaches the point of actual existence. God's idea is not subservient to error. He has no connection with it, and is not living with or retaining any sickness or other error. On the contrary, he abides in and is at one with divine Mind, Truth itself.

It is helpful to come to the firm conclusion that we can't be mesmerized to cling to error and it can't cling to us. We have power from God to accept and retain good alone. Immortal memory, a faculty of divine Mind, is frictionless, free of discord, including only good. Reflecting it, the real man can retain in consciousness nothing but good. In fact, what is erroneous cannot really assert itself to or abide in one's true consciousness.

Any error claiming to belong to us is a lie, not a condition that can persist. Although evil and good seem to mingle in human consciousness, they never touch. Mrs. Eddy's words in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures make this clear: "The temporal and unreal never touch the eternal and real. The mutable and imperfect never touch the immutable and perfect. The inharmonious and self-destructive never touch the harmonious and self-existent. These opposite qualities are the tares and wheat, which never really mingle, though (to mortal sight) they grow side by side until the harvest; then, Science separates the wheat from the tares, through the realization of God as ever present and of man as reflecting the divine likeness." ^{Science and Health, p. 300;}

How heartening that false beliefs can be put completely out of thought! Indeed, this promise of God voiced by Isaiah is for us: "The former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind." ^{Isa. 65:17.} Because only good has ever touched the real man's consciousness, there is nothing for us to retain in thought but good. And the retention in thought of good is certain to be manifested in harmony on our bodies and in our affairs.