Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer of Christian Science, once wrote, “If we regard good as more natural than evil, and spiritual understanding—the true knowledge of God—as imparting the only power to heal the sick and the sinner, we shall demonstrate in our lives the power of Truth and Love” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 3).

The spiritual understanding of God and man that Christian Science imparts enables us to put into daily practice the power of divine Truth and Love in overcoming sin, sickness, and mortality, undeterred by the suggestions and distractions of the physical senses. 

In the first chapter of Genesis in the Bible, where God’s spiritual creation is set forth, it is repeated over and over that “God saw that it was good” (see verses 10, 12, 18, 21, 25). Once, when noticing this repeated phrase, I looked up the word good in the Glossary of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mrs. Eddy and found that the first definition is “God” (p. 587). So I went back to those verses and read them as “God saw that it was [God].” I realized that these statements weren’t describing God seeing something separate from Himself and recognizing its goodness; what God was seeing as His creation was His own self-expression. 

We don’t have to do anything to make good real. The one creative Mind, God, has already done that.

That gave me a broader view of the allness, completeness, and oneness of God and His creation, including man. And because man—meaning each one of us, God’s children—is the image and likeness of God, we naturally have dominion over anything that appears to be the opposite of God, good, despite what the physical senses, or matter-based perceptions, may be reporting as real. 

These ideas became practical for me when I became very sick while on a vacation trip, experiencing stomach pain along with difficulty eating and getting around. The Christian Science practitioner I called to pray for me encouraged me to turn my thought away from what I was feeling physically to the spiritual understanding of my oneness with God, Spirit, in whom I “live, and move, and have [my] being” (Acts 17:28). She said that in doing so, I could have a “vacation” from the belief that matter could have any power over me. As the practitioner and I prayed together for several days, the pain and restriction diminished until I was well. From this experience, I saw more clearly that my peace, health, completeness, and joy depended not on what was going on in my body but on what was happening in my consciousness of God.

Each day, the news is filled with many distressing images, and if we believe that they depict the reality of life, we may be deceived into thinking that discord and evil of every kind are real, the norm, and that we have no control over them. Inflation, unemployment, disease, polarization in government, nations in conflict, harsh weather, disasters, and so on, may appear to be things we have to either live with or try to fix through human means. But all of this is an incorrect view of God’s creation suggesting that we are imperfect mortals who have to be made better.

The situations portrayed by these disturbing pictures are no part of God’s entirely good creation or the man of His creating. They are counterfeits of God’s creation, and while they may appear to be very real, Christian Science reverses this appearance of reality by lifting human consciousness into the light of spiritual Truth. In this light we can view and experience the good that’s inherent in us as God’s image and likeness and in life as the expression of the divine Life. 

We don’t have to do anything to make good real. The one creative Mind, God, has already done that, and this Mind forever knows that good is the only reality. All good is present for us to recognize and express through spiritual sense, which Science and Health describes as “a conscious, constant capacity to understand God” (p. 209). And utilizing this spiritual sense, this recognition of ever-present good, is prayer that takes form in our lives as redemption, reformation, and healing. 

Nearly two thousand years ago, Christ Jesus’ clear spiritual sense enabled him to take in only the facts of God’s spiritual reality as he reformed sinners, healed the sick, raised the dead, walked on water, fed multitudes, and so much more. Science and Health tells us: “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick” (pp. 476–477). 

This Science is still operating as law in human consciousness to free mankind from material sense and its effects on our experience. Science and Health says, “Immortal Mind, governing all, must be acknowledged as supreme in the physical realm, so-called, as well as in the spiritual” (p. 427). Mrs. Eddy’s discovery of the spiritual laws demonstrated by Jesus and others in the Bible disputes the account of creation in the second chapter of Genesis, which says that man springs from and returns to dust and that he is destined to be a sinner and sufferer all his days. These spiritual laws, Christian Science, lead humanity out of the darkness of material sense to the light of divine reality, where we find the power that heals any belief in an authority and presence apart from God, good.

Through our inherent spiritual sense, we all have an unlimited capacity to overcome this false belief. Understanding God and our unity with Him has the practical effect of destroying the fear caused by ignorance or sin, which is the underlying cause of all inharmony, including sickness and limitation of any kind. 

We can turn away from thinking of ourselves as material beings always in need to recognizing the reality that we are the perfect, spiritual expression of the divine Mind and are whole, loved, and satisfied right now. In prayer, we can listen for Christ, God’s message of love, which fills our thought with what’s true and leaves no room for false knowledge of man as mortal or governed by matter. 

Forever under God’s perfect government, we dwell in His kingdom, where harmony reigns, and so are free to exercise our spiritual sense and experience divine goodness in our lives in ways that are just right for us and in harmony with others.