Culprits and Correction

                                                        John Robert Howell


   
        One culprit that can send the healing process into seemingly endless and unnecessary innings or overtime is a misapprehension of what it is that needs healing.  One cruelly puckish aggressive mental suggestion of the carnal mind is the red herring that it should even be obvious to a dolt that it is matter that needs healing when the body is in revolt, whereas we learn in Christian Science that it should be plain that there is no something in nothing (matter) eligible for healing despite a seemingly vivid, but vacuous, melee of afflictions.

        An eraser does not correct a botched computation.  Computation and correction are mental processes, which may be expressed on a sheet of paper, but these visible numbers, correct or incorrect, are not realities.  It is always wrong thinking that needs correcting, i.e., healing, not sensory evidence.  An errantly directed pencil point (I know, nobody uses pencils any more, but work with me on this) is innocent as a newborn babe, though the flawed human thought guiding it via the hand is not and needs to profit from the salutary effects of the operation of Christ, Truth in consciousness.

       And one's thought does, as this letter Mary Baker Eddy received from someone she had healed points out:  "I should have died, but for the glorious Principle you teach--supporting the power of Mind over the body and showing me the nothingness of the so-called pleasures and pains of sense. The treatises I had read and medicines I had taken only abandoned me to more hopeless suffering and despair.  Adherence to hygiene was useless. Mortal mind needed to be set right.  The ailment was not bodily, but mental, and I was cured when I learned my way in Christian Science."  Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pages 382, 383