Editorial December 2, 1911 Issue

THE SURE FOUNDATION

John B. Willis

THERE can be no safe and stable superstructure without an adequate substructure, as all will concede, and that this is no less true of a life than of a building, all will do well to remember; also this, that while the foundation of a house may be quite unlike the material of the house itself, in character building the fundamental concept on which we build is revealed in every part of the structure, from sill to comb. The truth or falsity of one's impelling ideal is sure to project itself in his words and conduct.

They who have wrought mightily and achieved, who have proved themselves superior to the storm and stress of adverse fortune and left a lasting impress upon civilization, have always had their foundations laid upon the rock of Truth, and the world is rapidly recognizing how clearly this fact is illustrated in the instance of the woman of this age whose teaching and life-accomplishment have already marked an era in Christian history. In one sentence Mrs. Eddy has embodied the great essentials of the Christ consciousness, and the texture and quality of her thought, the secure abiding-place for her faith, in all the years of a momentous mental struggle. "God is my life." This was her supreme declaration, and it speaks for the continuity of that spiritual parentage and support which is not only emphasized, but which is being realized and demonstrated in Christian Science. It speaks, too, for the freedom and inspiration, the wisdom and capacity, the peace and joy which all pertain to that true living identified by Christ Jesus with the knowing of God. The compass and sweep of this assertion are simply tremendous, and it is impossible for one to make it while consenting to any baseness or materiality as belonging to his true selfhood or nature. This is the illumination and redemption of Christian Science, that it gives the intelligent daring of faith which accepts the unity of God and man, which claims and strives for the effective realization of kinship to Spirit.

In their effort to get at the truth of things many Christian believers have been led to accept the philosophy of material evolution as a means of scientifically articulating the man of material sense with God, Spirit, his assumed Father. Even Luke falls into this form of speech in his tabulated genealogy of the child Jesus, the son (as it was supposed) of Joseph, the son of Heli, and so on through the seventy-five generations enumerated, to Seth, the son of Adam who alone is denominated the "son of God." In human thought and statement the process of material procreation and development are supposed to link men to their creator, but for the average materialist the distance back through all the forms of animal life to the original divinely commissioned monad, is so interminably long that it begets a sense of removal from God, rather than of nearness to Him. Apart from the concept of man as the continuous manifestation of the divine activity, an uplifting realization of our kinship to God is handicapped to a degree that is utterly discouraging to spiritual aspiration.

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