Omnipresence Taken Without Qualification

Divine Science, the oldest of the organised New Thought denominations, takes God's omnipresence literally and without the qualifications more conventional theology often attaches to it: if God is wholly good and genuinely present everywhere without remainder, then no place, including a sick body or an empty account, can be a place that presence has failed to reach. Catherine Albanese's history of American metaphysical religion traces the doctrine to Malinda Cramer's teaching in San Francisco converging with the Brooks sisters' parallel teaching in Denver in the 1880s and 1890s, both arguing from the same premise that recognising an already-present reality, rather than petitioning for one that is absent, is the entire work faith requires. Because a presence this complete leaves no genuine gap for illness or lack to occupy as a separate reality, Divine Science teaches that such conditions are appearances to be seen through by right recognition rather than external facts to be corrected by appeal to a distant deity, the same logical structure the wider New Thought movement builds its practice of affirmative prayer on. This premise, shared with the movement's other denominations, functions in Divine Science literature as a metaphysical starting point rather than a conclusion argued to from first principles, the plain consequence of taking two already-accepted claims, God's goodness and God's omnipresence, at their full strength rather than leaving them softened by exception.