Article April 26, 1913 Issue

OMNIPRESENT PRINCIPLE

MARTHA R. WHITE.

To those who believe that life is in matter, or body, man seems to have two phases of being, a material and a spiritual. The human life, a matter of bone and tissue, is believed to be the present phase, while the wholly spiritual is considered a state of existence only to be attained by passing the portals of death. Life in oneness with God becomes a distant hope under this code, while the present life must be grimly battled for and then defended in conflict with the world.

Under this sense of God as a God afar off, many have sunk with a feeling of intolerable loneliness and separation. Mrs. Eddy's great boon to humanity lies in the fact that she has done away for all time with the belief in separation by proving that man has but one life, and that one spiritual, here and now; that life is not inherent in matter, but in Mind ; and that man's oneness with God can be proven here and now by recourse to that Mind, through which recourse the world is once more beholding the object-lesson, or proof through acts of healing, repeating the so-called miracles of the New Testament. She has shown that these miracles, these proofs of the immanence of God as man's divine Principle, are not violations of law, but a bringing into active operation of an ever-present law of being, long unused because not understood. Jesus, she has shown us, "was the most scientific man that ever trod the globe. He plunged beneath the material surface of things, and found the spiritual cause" (Science and Health, p. 313). The comfort and consolation of the right understanding of God and man's relation to Him, as taught in Christian Science, utterly destroys the sense of separation and the ills which result therefrom.

Christian Science shows that life is not inherent in or dependent on bodily structure. It is not a by-product of a certain fortuitous arrangement of organism. On the contrary, the body, as we see it, is the embodiment of a state of consciousness, and changes with the changing phases of that consciousness, as the picture on the lantern-screen changes with the moving film. This is proven in every Christian Science demonstration, where a change in the patient's state of consciousness is followed by a change in bodily condition. Causation is here proven to be mental. Were there not this connection of cause and effect between consciousness and bodily condition, no such phenomenon as a Christian Science demonstration could ever take place.

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