After Jesus had healed the lunatic boy that his disciples had failed to heal, they asked him, "Why could not we cast him out?" He replied, "Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you" (Matt. 17:19, 20).

What did the Master mean by "faith as a grain of mustard seed," a quality of faith which he said in effect could overcome any mountainous obstacle of human belief? One does not ordinarily attribute faith in God to a seed. One meaning might be that even a grain of faith will effectively overcome evil. Another viewpoint is that Jesus desired to have his disciples consider how completely concurrent with and obedient to its cause is the mustard seed. It never exhibits any deviation from the purpose for which it exists. It offers no insubordination to the law which governs it. When planted it grows, multiplies, and honors its source.

In a sense it has no unbelief, is not hampered by the least lack of faith. Its only allegiance is to God, for while to the material senses a mustard seed appears as a physical concept, its true identity is an idea of Mind, subject only to Mind. Says Mary Baker Eddy of a seed's spiritual verity, "The only intelligence or substance of a thought, a seed, or a flower is God, the creator of it" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 508).

One way for us to "have faith as a grain of mustard seed" is to realize how divinely natural it is for man to express health and holiness rather than sin and disease. To believe it is natural for man to be afflicted with sin and disease would be like the mustard seed turning aside from its identity as a productive seed and becoming a completely different concept.

But neither a mustard seed nor any other seed can do this, because its identity and nature are defined and preserved by its cause. There is no alternative to its being what it is made to be and functioning as its cause causes it to function. Its status and destiny are beyond its control. What it is and what it is to do are wholly the prerogative of its source.

Here is illustrated the naturalness of God's absolute and constant control of man, also man's equally God-derived, unalterable ability to be what God makes him to be, even His joyous, harmonious expression of Life, Truth, and Love. Since this is the one natural status of man, and since in his thus-conditioned being his divine destiny inheres, man is enabled by the one Ego he reflects ever to realize and demonstrate his superiority to every mountain or depression of material belief that would claim to dispossess him of the health and holiness that are his as the son of God.

Mrs. Eddy, speaking with that authority which accompanies the Mind-given power of penetrating analysis, says of Jesus' healing record: "It was the consummate naturalness of Truth in the mind of Jesus, that made his healing easy and instantaneous. Jesus regarded good as the normal state of man, and evil as the abnormal; holiness, life, and health as the better representatives of God than sin, disease, and death" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 200).

Christian Science is educating men to understand the "naturalness of Truth" and its effect, a healthy, godly man. By teaching its students the eternally true idea of God as the one perfect Mind and of man as the spiritual, immaterial idea or son of this Mind, never materially parented, embodied, or environed, it brings to individual thought the naturalness of life as the expression of the fearless, joyous, harmonious Mind that is God.

It is wholly unnatural for anyone to have colds in winter, hay fever in summer, or a crop of other sicknesses in between. It is wholly unnatural for certain diseases to appear in human childhood and other diseases, or impairment of faculties, at some later point on the calendar of material thought. It is wholly unnatural for youth to fall victim to sinful emotions, degrading impulses, and false appetites, or for adults to continue in states of mesmerism to these unadulterated falsities of evil material thought that promise much and give only bondage.

Why are all these things unnatural? Because they are godless and so truthless. They are negative, unintelligent. They argue that life and sensation are material; that man can be unwillingly afflicted with disease, or somewhat willingly inoculated, with sin, and that God, though presumably good, permits or condones, though He may not initiate, such misadventures. All this denies the singleness of God's power because it admits a secondary evil power. It denies the only rational reason for man's existence, namely, to individualize and to be the concrete and constant evidence of pure intelligence, Mind, Spirit, God.

The forces of false material education instill in thought either the naturalness or the possibleness of affliction, and wink at sinful derelictions as being natural, or nearly so, for the present, though ultimately they are frowned on by Deity. Christian Science exposes the illogical, evasive nature of such thinking and plants in individual consciousness seeds of pure faith in the absoluteness, oneness, and allness of God, good, and His present and eternal creation of healthy, sinless individualities who are fathered, mothered, conditioned, and controlled by perfect intelligence, the one Ego, God, alone.

These seeds planted in the soil of honest hearts, watered by humility, and cultivated by sincerity grow and multiply. They provide the faith wherewith to remove the mirage mountains of material sense, and to demonstrate the eternal naturalness and present realizability of man's health and holiness as the representative of unselfed good. God.

Paul Stark Seeley