Christian Science is exact Science. Its divine Principle, God, who is also Love, tenderly insists on all its rules being obeyed in order that its full fruitage of health and satisfaction may appear.

When the writer was once meeting a physical difficulty, the Christian Science practitioner, whom he had asked to help him, repeatedly called his attention to the Biblical statement (Isa. 46:9, 10), "I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure." The practitioner pointed out that just as God declares the end from the beginning, so we too in seeking healing need always to recognize and affirm the end, our perfect wholeness, from the start. As the patient did this, it contributed powerfully to the healing which followed.

On page 374 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy writes, "You confess to ignorance of the future and incapacity to preserve your own existence, and this belief helps rather than hinders disease." Do we sometimes help disease by confessing to ignorance of the future? Then let us stop helping disease and see, instead, the end from the beginning; let us affirm our certainty of radical and complete healing. Job did not wait for material symptoms of recovery before he rose above his earlier doubts and confidently declared (19:26), "Yet in my flesh shall I see God," and this rejection by him of belief in the sufferings of the flesh prepared the way for his later experience to be abundantly blessed.

Christian Science does not teach the reading or foretelling of future human events by exercise of supposed preternatural or occult powers of the human mind. Such phases of material thinking play no part whatever in the practice of Christian Science, which is spiritual, normal, and scientific. On page 84 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy says: "The ancient prophets gained their foresight from a spiritual, incorporeal standpoint, not by foreshadowing evil and mistaking fact for fiction,—predicting the future from a groundwork of corporeality and human belief. When sufficiently advanced in Science to be in harmony with the truth of being, men become seers and prophets involuntarily, controlled not by demons, spirits, or demigods, but by the one Spirit."

The student of Christian Science learns the spiritual facts of being and how these facts operate to lead him into all harmony. He learns that from everlasting to everlasting God unerringly governs all; he learns that because God governs all, only good can have real existence; he learns that disease, sin, death, and all other phases of evil are insubstantial phenomena produced by the mortal, material belief in a power opposed to God, and that this supposed power and its phenomena are dispelled by the illuminations of Truth. From this spiritually enlightened altitude the student sees, in whatever direction he looks, only spiritual perfection and its eternal, harmonious unfoldment from blessing to blessing.

Such spiritualization of thought appears in human experience as a firm, continuing confidence that whatever the material evidence may threaten, the future holds for us in reality only good. This spiritualization of thought also produces, when necessary, the more detailed insight into future destiny and developments which men and women of spiritual vision have shown all down the ages. The paragraph on page 84 of Science and Health, already referred to, concludes, "It is the prerogative of the ever-present, divine Mind, and of thought which is in rapport with this Mind, to know the past, the present, and the future."

Refusing to confess ignorance of the future, but knowing the future to be good, nourishes in thought two other potent healing factors— gratitude and joy. Christ Jesus recognized that Larazus' sickness was not unto death, but was one more opportunity to show forth the glory of God; he could therefore give public thanks to God for hearing his prayer even before Lazarus emerged from the tomb. And of Abraham, who had lived some two thousand years before him, Jesus said (John 8:56), "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad." Abraham's joyful foresight of the appearing of the Christ enabled him to receive the far-reaching divine promises of blessings for his own posterity and for the whole earth (see Gen. 18:17, 18).

If we doubt God's purpose to bless us tomorrow, and we withhold joy and gratitude, we are doubting His purpose to bless us today. What God will be tomorrow, He was yesterday and is today; Principle does not change. By being grateful for the end from the beginning and by rejoicing in the certain blessing, we halt the false processes calling themselves disease or difficulty of any other kind and make powerful contribution to healing.

Christian Scientists are familiar with the lines in Hymn No. 238 of the Christian Science Hymnal,

It is equally true that all of good the future has is here for us to rejoice in now. We can rejoice in the eternal spiritual facts of perfect God, perfect man, and perfect universe. We can rejoice in the certainty that the understanding of these facts will heal all our problems of body, of the affections, of occupation, of supply, and bring us an ever more abundant sense of living. We can rejoice that the Science of Christ will inevitably bring into obedience to divine Principle all mankind, abolishing war, poverty, disease, sorrow, and sweeping away the restrictions of space and materiality.

We can rejoice gratefully that the whole illusion of limitation and material living will be finally and utterly dissipated by the clear light of eternal Life and Truth, which know neither past, present, nor future, but only and always the perfect now, and man dwelling in it.

In the Bible we read (Eccl. 3: 15), "God requireth that which is past." God requires also the future. We have no reason to confess ignorance of the future; it is Christianly scientific to know confidently that the blessing of divine Principle, which is also changeless Love, rests actively upon it.