Article August 16, 1913 Issue

Our critic objects to the Christian Science statement...

Harry I. Hunt—Hackensack, N. J.

The Bergen News

Our critic objects to the Christian Science statement: "Heaven is not a locality, but a divine state of Mind in which all the manifestations of Mind are harmonious and immortal, because sin is not there and man is found having no righteousness of his own, but in possession of 'the mind of the Lord,' as the Scripture says" (Science and Health, p. 291). In Jesus' closing address to his disciples, as reported by St. John, occurs the quotation referred to by the critic: "I go to prepare a place for you." Farther along in the same address, Jesus says: "These things have I spoken unto you in proverbs [American Standard version: dark sayings]: but the time cometh when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but I shall show you plainly of the Father." Thus Jesus himself makes it plain that the only reference in the four gospels to a "place" which he was to prepare for his followers, was a figure of speech which would be explained to them as they progressed in the understanding of his teachings.

Elsewhere Jesus declares that heaven is not a place. In Luke we find this: "When he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, Lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." This is a clear, definite statement that the kingdom or rule of God within the individual consciousness makes heaven a present possibility, and not a place or locality into which the good man is to be ushered at some future period.

In discussing the fall of man, our critic fails to make the distinction made by Christian Science between man made in God's image and likeness, and man formed out of the dust of the ground, the Adam-man. Christian Science accepts the Biblical statement, wherein man is described as made in the image of God and after His likeness, belonging to that creation pronounced "very good" by the creator. The Adam-man, described in the second chapter of Genesis, is the man referred to in Romans, "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin." Here we have the origin of sin and its consequence, death, boldly credited to Adam by St. Paul; to the man "of the earth, earthy," the counterfeit of the real or spiritual man. Sin is thus seen to be not an expression of intelligence or a law of infinite wisdom, but the manifestation of the mortal man of dust, out of whose heart (consciousness) "proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, ... thefts, ... blasphemies." If we are to be benefited by the Scriptures, we must have an intelligent understanding of them. Thus, the recognition of the good in us as marking the man made in God's image and likeness, leads to the understanding that all that is unlike God is unlike the man made in His image. This recognition that the good in us is the real, gives us far greater power to resist evil and part company with it than our old beliefs about the fall of man.

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