A Christian Science practitioner received a call for help from a church member in a small Christian Science organization. There was trouble in the church. The one calling was one of a group that was at outs with another group. Both groups were putting on a pretty poor exhibition of Christian Science. In fact they were acting as though they knew little or nothing about the love and unity which this Science inculcates. The next day a call came to the same practitioner from a member of the other group. Both of those calling wished the practitioner to pray for the healing of the discord in the church. Neither knew the other was calling.

Christian Science had taught the practitioner to base every treatment on the spiritual facts of being, God and His idea. She resolutely turned her thought away from this scene of contentious mortals. She knew that no such condition was attributable to God, infinite intelligence, positive Mind, and that it therefore had no substance or verity.

She saw that the spiritual fact which needed to be realized was that there is but one omnipotent Mind, the Father intelligence, which is individually and always demonstrated by men in humility, consideration, and good will. The fatherhood of the one God and the resulting brotherhood of man she saw were the antidote for evil's lie that there is a negative material mind evidenced in self-willed, contentious mortals, misunderstanding and striving with one another.

The practitioner saw that each group honestly believed it was in the right because each was using merely human reasoning of its own fashioning to form its judgments on the questions at issue. These students were not letting the one uniting Mind direct them. "Reason," says Mary Baker Eddy, "is the most active human faculty" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 327). But this very active human faculty may, as in this case, lead to conclusions that are at variance with the unifying will of God unless subordinated, through humility and unselfed desire, to unerring Principle.

A common habit of mortals is to start reasoning from the basis of a personal desire or opinion concerning some situation or course of action, and then produce all the human reasons the one concerned can find or invent to bolster up his position. But to reason rightly one must reason logically from the one true premise, God and His idea. Then a correct conclusion is inevitable.

"For right reasoning," writes Mrs. Eddy, "there should be but one fact before the thought, namely, spiritual existence" (ibid., p. 492). This one fact the two church groups had overlooked, or recognized only vaguely. The practitioner, however, saw that in the universe of Mind there was no wrong-reasoning process to mislead man. Every individual expression of God knows only what his all-loving, causative Mind causes him to know. Misguided human reasoning can exercise no influence in or over his consciousness. It lacks authority and cannot affect or reverse the truthful knowing which is always the God-constituted consciousness of man.

In her treatments the practitioner recognized the spiritual fact that the children of God have but one Mind, and that this common Parent, or causative intelligence, sees to it that its every individual manifestation is always in understanding accord with every other individual manifestation, all joined in that conscious unity of thought, purpose, and judgment essential to universal harmony and peace.

Evil, the so-called willful material mind, was seen to be not really Mind at all, and its material, contending mortal puppets were recognized as not the verity of man, but only the fictitious material counterfeit. It was seen that the true idea of God and man was present in each individual consciousness to reverse and silence false human reasoning and bring to light in the thought of each the Mind-derived judgments which are sanctioned by eternal wisdom and made potent by everlasting Love.

The result of this was that evil's claim of division and twoness was dissolved. The two groups became one. The church was united instead of divided, and greatly strengthened to accomplish more fully its healing purpose. This was brought about simply by the practitioner's utilization of the true idea of God and man wherewith to dissolve and destroy in the consciousness of those concerned their mistaken reliance on mere human reasoning. She saw that this idea enabled them to accept that right reasoning which flows from the spiritual fact that God, good, is the only Mind of man and holds all His children in unity of thought and achievement. These well-intentioned church members found they could "do all things without murmurings and disputing" (Phil. 2:14), when they were willing to open their thought to and place dependence not on unspiritual human reasoning, but on the unifying ideas of Love's revealing.

Contention and division in human affairs are found in a multitude of forms and places, from quarreling children to contentious nations. All such conditions are the result of fallacious human reasoning. Christian Science aids us to free thought from this reasoning of material-mindedness that is often blinded with selfish willfulness, and to accept the unselfish right reasoning which is based on the true idea of God as the only Mind, ever imparting to its reflection, man, the thoughts and judgments which guide each individual with true wisdom and unite him in natural accord with his brother.

So often we are tempted to try to determine merely with human reason what course of action we should take. Sometimes a decision is reached which, from the human viewpoint, seems well justified. Later it is seen to have been a mistake for reasons which human reasoning did not perceive. Christian Science shows us that mere human reasoning should never be our sole or our chief dependence. The only sure way to a correct judgment is to reason from God alone, the one real, omniactive, and all-controlling Mind, which is ever available to guide our thought in every situation, however trivial, to the judgment that makes for progress and peace. More prayer for God's guidance before making our decisions will eliminate the need for much more prayer after making them.

Paul Stark Seeley