Aware of the great effect one's thinking has upon one's experience, the true Christian Scientist strives earnestly to follow the counsel of Mrs. Eddy, "Stand porter at the door of thought." ^{Science and Health, p. 392;} In so doing he joyfully accepts positive, Godlike thoughts and rejects negative, unproductive thoughts as false suggestions.

While good and healthy thoughts are reflected in a happy and healthy human experience, false suggestions often become manifested as a mental or physical disorder. Such a condition is no cause for fear or self-condemnation, however. It is merely an alarm, announcing the seeming presence of that which does not belong to God's man.

Were an intruder discovered in our home, we would not stand idly by, hoping that he would get his mischief over with quickly and be on his way. Nor would we waste time condemning ourselves for letting in the intruder in the first place. Instead we would act positively, swiftly, and completely to remove him.

Similarly, if the suggestion of disease enters our thinking, we need not feel that we have to submit to a period of suffering as punishment for failing to expel the thought in the first instance. Nor should we pray that such suffering be as brief as possible. Instead we should expose the intruding belief as false and cast it out.

Often disease is accompanied by the belief that it must pass from one phase of suffering to another until completing a cycle back to health. To pray that such a cycle be as swift as possible would be to give the belief stature by placing oneself at its mercy. And to deny the reality of the belief of cycle on the one hand, while affirming a law of penalty on the other, would be contradictory and little more than fighting with oneself.

Truth does not accelerate error. It erases it! Error, or an erroneous belief, ceases as the truth uncovers its fraudulent nature. This is the healing process, and it can be as swift as thought, as complete as perfection.

Time is no factor in healing. Erroneous conditions last only as long as the erroneous thoughts which project them. Erroneous thoughts last until they are reversed and replaced by true thoughts, by the truth of God and of man's relation to Him.

Far from being merely a twentieth century concept, the importance of probing one's thinking was pointed out by the Apostle Paul in his reference to "casting down imaginations... and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ." ^{II Cor. 10:5;} A boil, a cold, or a fever is nothing but an image of false thinking. Each disappears in direct proportion to the correction of such thinking, to the eradication and replacement of erroneous thoughts by the Christ, Truth.

Mrs. Eddy says, "The remedy consists in probing the trouble to the bottom, in finding and casting out by denial the error of belief which produces a mortal disorder, never honoring erroneous belief with the title of law nor yielding obedience to it." ^{Science and Health, p. 184.}

When a child is frightened by the image of a monster in a dream to seek motherly comfort, the loving parent does not explain that the monster will go away eventually. Instead he tells the child that there is no monster at all, that he only imagines one to exist, and that he is really safe and well.

Physical or mental anguish possesses no more reality than the monster in the child's dream. And like a dream, which is just as unreal in its third or fourth stage as at the beginning, a physical or mental disorder is just as unreal, just as much a false suggestion, in the middle of its so-called cycle as it was at the start.

Just as it is never too late to awaken from a dream, so it is never too late to claim one's identity as the expression of God and to cast out anything inconsistent with this identity.