Description
This is a word-for-word record of the twelve days of Primary Class taught by Mr. Young. It includes answers to questions from students during the intermissions. Reading it is like going through class with one of the finest teachers the movement has ever known. Mr. Young remarks on each synonym and shows how man is the pure reflection of these seven terms for God. He talks about the unreality of matter and the handling of animal magnetism, then gives many practical insights on how to heal yourself and others.
It is important in Christian Science that we not become so lost in the absolute statements, that we do not make it practical. We must apply this Science to the human need and bring about healing, for the Word of God must be made evident in the human experience. While Mr. Young is very metaphysical in his teaching, he always insists that we relate the truth to the error in consciousness and overcome it.
In the absolute sense he states, “Insist upon knowing yourself as God knows you. Realize that God has created man in His own image, unlimited, harmonious, incorruptible, pure, and perfect, that that individual man will never cease to exist, to express God. God must have an expression, must be manifested, to verify His own existence. Man is this expression. Get your thinking away from corporeal sense, so that your thinking is in accord with Principle. Recognize the naturalness of right ideas, and the infinite range of your thought when it expresses divine Principle.”
Then, on the practical side, he remarks about the healing practice, “Treatment is the divine presence. One has to be it all the time! It is a case of being alive, so much alive that nothing can fool you. Alertness is the state of man, the very constant consciousness of God, God’s consciousness. See what Being is and be! It is being that counts. Not just seeing — being. And that being means that it is proper for us to expect to be able to think as Mind, not merely about it. The real practitioner is found in the realization of that oneness of Being. The thing that gives the treatment value is not the practitioner, but his realization of Mind as the only Being or intelligence or act, and the law of his treatment is perfection.
“In treating himself, the practitioner is educating and healing somebody else. If he demonstrates that there is only one Mind, he will heal the person that is sick, because there is one Mind. There are not two persons, but the sons of God with one Mind. . . .
“Only as I redeem myself can I help someone else. In treatment what happens is your realization of God and your oneness with that realization, or the realization of the oneness of God and man. Your point of view makes it impossible to accept the testimony of the senses. That testimony, having no foundation, is made to disappear.”
Mr. Young covers the main subjects of class teaching, and he also has much to say about the application of Christian Science to all avenues of human experience. He shows how to relate to the world as a demonstrating Scientist, and how to cope with the many challenges that practitioners face in the public practice. For those who have not had class, or who feel that going through class did not answer all of their questions, this verbatim report will be invaluable.