Many a person, listening to his first Christian Science church service, silently rehearses to himself the truths he hears and applies them to problems confronting him. Others, attending their first Christian Science lecture, carry on a similar argument. Still others, when for the first time reading Christian Science literature, challenge their difficulties with the facts gleaned from the printed page. To such people the practice of Christian Science is, at sight, a perfectly natural and almost irresistible process.

Others there are who defer their practical use of Christian Science indefinitely. They attend lectures and church services; they read "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy; they employ a Christian Science practitioner on occasion. Yet they are strangely slow to utilize, by personal effort, what they hear or read or believe, in healing themselves or others.

Now and then a person, after a brief but faithful study of Christian Science, without yet having had the benefit of class instruction, is asked by others for treatment. He should respond if he feels equal to the situation, and favorable results should be expected.

From the foregoing it is manifest that there are no mysteries in Christian Science. Its teachings and methods are an open book to the conscientious. Children wield its beneficent power. So do the untutored and uncultured. The intelligentsia are impressed with its logic, its reasonableness. And the wide generality of investigators are delighted with its confirmations of what they have hoped and possibly believed.

Nothing is more inevitable than for reflective people to believe in a Supreme Being—a Supreme Being who is unqualifiedly good. Drawing aside the veil of appearance, Christian Science reveals perfect God and perfect man. There is something in everybody at enmity with evil in all its forms—sickness, deprivation, despair included. No one has been able to explain, satisfactorily, why the good should suffer, although all down the ages untold millions have wondered. It is normal to be in perpetual revolt against pain and limitation, as outlaws without authority, legitimacy, or permanence. Over and over again has it been proved that distress and limitation lack genuineness. They are in the realm of fictitious phenomena as distinguished from reality. Hence incurability is a myth.

Amplify the spiritual facts of being, silently or audibly, in your talk with yourself or to others who ask for help. Here is the basis of intelligent prayer, the foundation of Christian Science treatment, the assurance of universal salvation.

The Supreme Being is defined by Christian Science as Spirit, that is, as Mind, Life, Truth, Love, Soul, Principle; and man is justly dignified as God's expression or manifestation. Hence it is that Jesus could say to Philip, who asked to see the Father, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."

Man, then, the likeness of God, must be and is spiritual and immortal—a stranger to age, disease, dissolution. "Knowing that Soul and its attibutes were forever manifested through man," wrote Mary Baker Eddy, "the Master healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, feet to the lame, thus bringing to light the scientific action of the divine Mind on human minds and bodies and giving a better understanding of Soul and salvation" (Science and Health, p. 210).

Soul or Spirit is the only substance of man. What is called a mortal or material man is made of nothing more than the stuff which constitutes dreams. This misapprehension of man is put aside by the individual who recognizes himself for what he truly is, namely, a compound of eternal spiritual qualities indissolubly united. Thus aroused, one can say, understandingly: "Perfect God, perfect man, and I am that man." This is the truth which, admitted and continued in, breaks the oppression of materiality and mortality. Here again is the spiritual basis for a Christian Science treatment, so simple indeed that he who runs may invoke it.

Take a case of congestion or sluggishness, for example. Disease usually is too little or too much action. Realize the presence, to the innermost recesses of your being, of Life exuberant and irrepressible. Since Life, your Life, is God, it possesses these qualities. It knows no inertia, interference, opposition, weakness. Harmonious and normal action really is a constant condition throughout your economy.

Have the courage to contemplate these truths, to pronounce them of yourself, to claim your status as whole, sound, intact—a son of God. This process is prayer or treatment. It will put to flight the deception known as disease, which is part of the universal lie that the dynamics of Truth extinguish.

One reinforces mental and spiritual effort by recognizing that divine Mind imparts to him the capacity requisite for the occasion. This attitude in itself is part of unceasing prayer. Mind gives one not only the ability to discern the actuality of health but the ability to carry on successfully in the world of achievement. The principal impediment to the mastery of difficulties and the attainment of success is apparent lack of intelligence. But there can be no such lack to him who perceives that all intelligence is vested in divine Mind, and that man, as an individual spiritual consciousness, reflects that Mind.

Turning to divine Mind for guidance, one is kept in safety as well as in usefulness. Nothing is more certain than that God is ever watchful of His people, and that "the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind." It is impossible that one should get beyond His constant care. Those thrust into places of supposed danger often awake to the consciousness of His presence, and hence are secure from harm. "I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine," is His assurance. "When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned."

Peter V. Ross