Our Conversation Is in Heaven

The Elizabethan language is not the language of the twentieth century, and so it comes about that the Greek word which the translators of the Authorized Version rendered conversation, in the epistle to the Philippians, means really citizenship. Now, when the apostle to the Gentiles wrote that a man's citizenship was in heaven, he meant, of course, that he was dwelling in that mental understanding of Principle which constitutes harmony. Paul knew well enough that matter was not a reality. The men who raised Eutychus and Dorcas, and who not only preached the gospel, as they traveled, but healed the sick, had fathomed to some extent the depths of mental causation, and understood perfectly well, in their moments of keenest insight, exactly what Mrs. Eddy was one day to put into words for a later generation, when she wrote, on page 598 of Science and Health: "One moment of divine consciousness, or the spiritual understanding of Life and Love, is a foretaste of eternity. This exalted view, obtained and retained when the Science of being is understood, would bridge over with life discerned spiritually the interval of death, and man would be in the full consciousness of his immortality and eternal harmony, where sin, sickness, and death are unknown."

The difficulty of the individual struggling with his own materiality is to convert these moments into minutes, with a view of lengthening the minutes into hours. The evidence of the senses is so what the world to-day is pleased to call intriguing, that the effort to reduce material phenomena to their true insubstantiality of mental pictures seems to result only in fleeting seconds of true spiritual perception. In the struggle to achieve this end, it is absolutely essential to keep perpetually before one's self the realization of the fact that the material phenomena in the midst of which the individual lives, and moves, and has his being, are nothing but so many mirages which owe their fictitious existence to the suggestion of mortal mind. When this is once understood, the effort to keep material phenomena in thought for exactly what they are is one which must be relentlessly maintained. For every time that the human mind is permitted to reassert its concept of them as objective realities, the difficulty of displacing the false images is increased.

The false image is what seems the obvious fact to the human senses. Every time a man asks triumphantly whether he is to believe the evidence of his senses, or to believe his eyes, he is, if he could understand it, challenging Principle. The evidence of his senses, the evidence before his eyes, is the suggestion of that mortal mind of which these senses and eyes are themselves the agents. "The material body," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 416 of Science and Health, "which you call me, is mortal mind, and this mind is material in sensation, even as the body, which has originted from this material sense and been developed according to it, is material." Therefore, when a man appeals to his senses or to his eyes for confirmation of a material delusion, he is merely appealing to a second delusion in support of the first. The whole of matter is but a counterfeit of spiritual creation, and the human being viewing this matter, which seems so real to him, is in reality only looking at something which owes even its fictitious existence to the fact that there is a reality to counterfeit. That was precisely what Jesus meant when he said to the Pharisees, "Ye are of your father the devil," that is to say, Ye are the children of mortal mind, of mental suggestion; "and the lusts of your father ye will do," you will be imposed upon by the suggestion of this mortal mind. But then, in another moment, he swept the whole mirage into its native nothingness with the declaration, he "abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him," in other words, this mortal mind never in reality existed, being only suggestion, and could not exist because there is no reality in suggestion.