Article October 9, 1902 Issue

The Question of Reality

Charles K. Skinner

Muskegon (Mich.) News

Christian Science is based on the Scriptures in all their spiritual purity, it begins with God as All, omnipotent and omnipresent. It takes the spiritual creation as given in the first chapter and the first five verses of the second chapter of Genesis as the only creation. It goes farther, however, and says as God is Spirit, as the Scriptures aver, and He created man in His image and likeness, necessarily then man must be, is, spiritual, and he was given dominion over all. Christian Science therefore contends that the true man, God's idea, is the only real man, and that he never dies because he is the living, spiritual idea of an ever-living God. In Genesis, 2:5, we find the words : "Every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew." Christian Science insists that all God's creation is spiritual, perfect, and eternal, hence real and never to be destroyed. It does not deny, but admits, that all that appears real to the mortal senses is real to those senses; but those very senses and all they take cognizance of, being subject to the laws of matter, sickness, death, decomposition, etc., are not, cannot be, real in the true sense of the term. It is not through matter that man is enabled to regain that spiritual birth right of "dominion over all" which he must some time reach, and it is a loss of time to persist in looking there for help, for the command was, "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."

In "Miscellaneous Writings" (page 86), Mrs. Eddy says: "What mortals hear, see, feel, taste, smell, constitute their present earth and heavens. . . . To take all earth's beauty into one gulp of vacuity and label beauty nothing, is ignorantly to caricature God's creation; which is unjust to human sense, and to the divine realism. In our immature sense of spiritual things, let us say of the beauties of the sensuous universe: 'I love your promise; and shall know, sometime, the spiritual reality and substance of form, light, and color, of what I now through you discern dimly.' " If any person finds difficulty in understanding Mrs. Eddy's writings, as I did on the first perusal of them, let him not assume on this score the right, as some people do, to judge her teachings harshly. When men discern spiritual truth imperfectly, which is not an uncommon experience with the casual reader of Science and Health, they may be said to "see men as trees walking," and forthwith they go and report accordingly. The trouble is not with the truth, nor with Mrs. Eddy's statement of it, but with their erroneous conception.

Charles K. Skinner.
In the Muskegon (Mich.) News.

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