What really satisfies?

How can one give up smoking? Through Christianly scientific prayer. The understanding, gained through prayer, that God gives all true satisfaction, that He is the supreme power governing the universe, and that man is His spiritual, immortal offspring, brings into human experience something of the Christ, Truth, Which heals.

Consciousness strengthened by Truth is also purified. When one's thought is spiritually purified, one recognizes the falsity of the claim that man is material and needs something to stimulate and satisfy him physically. He replaces such suggestions with the immortal satisfaction that comes from turning wholeheartedly to God.

Christ Jesus' constant recognition of his spiritual nature, his unity with god, enabled him to demonstrate the impotence of evil. "Ye shall know the truth ," he said, "and the truth shall make you free." n1

N1 John 8:32.

When the therapeutic power of Truth permeates thought, the fear of losing the anticipation and excitement of sensual pleasure is dispelled.

God, the source of man's real identity, expresses through man His pure, satisfied nature. A genuine desire to understand this fact does much toward solving human problems, including addiction to smoking.

I have always been very grateful for my own healing of the tobacco habit. At a time when I was using between thirty and forty cigarettes a day, I became very ill. I sought the help of a Christian Science practitioner. His encouragement, together with my own prayers and daily study of the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scripturesm by Mary Baker Eddy, n2 revealed that my real need was for moral regeneration. I saw that God's man is not vulnerable to the enslavement of mortal concepts.

N2 Mrs. Eddy is the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science.

As I accepted that all real desires stem from God and that perfect health is man's true status, the physical healing took place. The words of Mrs. Eddy, referring to the person who has more animal than moral courage, made me realize that lack of moral integrity was the real problem: "Through human consciousness, convince the mortal of his mistake in seeking material means for gaining happiness. Reason is the most active human faculty. Let that inform the sentiments and awaken the man's dormant sense of moral obligation, and by degrees he will learn the nothingness of the pleasures of human sense and the grandeur and bliss of a spiritual sense, which silences the material or corporeal. Then he not only will be saved, but ism saved." n3

N3 Science and Health,m pp. 327-328.

With the satisfaction derived from assimilating the truth that Christian Science showed me, I found that I was completely free from any desire for tobacco. This freedom has been permanent.

Of course, one doesn't have to become ill before he can be healed of the tobacco habit. But this is the way it happened for me; and it helped me see that Christian Science not only restores physical wellbeing, it enhances moral integrity.

"Christian Science brings to the body the sunlight of Truth," assures Mrs. Eddy, "which invigorates and purifies." In the same paragraph she writes, "The effect of this Science is to stir the human mind to a change of base, on which it may yield to the harmony of the divine Mind." n4 Such a fundamental, healing change is possible through prayer.

N4 Ibid.,m p. 162.

DAILY BIBLE VERSE Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings . . . . I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness. Psalms 17:8, 15