Article November 17, 1917 Issue

Ideas and Ideals

LOUIS A. GREGORY

Christ Jesus taught that there is nothing in materiality worthy to be held up to mankind as an ideal. He represented the mental, metaphysical, or spiritual as the ideal. Although he healed all kinds of disease, raised the dead, multiplied the loaves and fishes, walked on the water, and worked marvelous changes in material conditions, his counsel was, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." The kingdom to which he points is absolutely ideal. He makes it clear, however, that this ideal is not to be attained in a distant future state, but that it is a present condition of right consciousness, and is the source of immediate good, or practical results.

Materialistic thought often scoffs at ideals. It has tried to idealize material means and things, but always fails, finding the result as mutable and imperfect as belief in matter necessarily is. Things metaphysical or spiritual are entirely beyond material comprehension, so to it the ideal seems visionary and impracticable. Christian Science demonstrates that man and his consciousness are spiritual, not material; so to God's man there is nothing intangible or unattainable about the ideas of Spirit, which are the ideals of Christian metaphysics. These ideals are based upon spiritual ideas, so in Christian Science the words idea and ideal are practically synonymous.

Human thought attributes reality to evil as well as to good, and thus would pervert the ideality of ideas into a double standard for measuring both good and evil. It was of this erroneous human thought that Shakespeare wrote, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," and that Blackstone in his commentaries on fundamental civil law declares, "Thoughts are deeds, and may be crimes." These statements advance beyond the gross materiality that conceives matter to be the controlling factor, for they clearly state the supremacy of thought; but they mistakenly attribute as great power to so-called evil thought as they do to good thought. They fall short of the truth that makes free, the truth that good is the only power. Christian Science accepts this truth as fundamental and, going from human belief to spiritual understanding, maintains that God is the only Mind and His ideas are perfect, actually ideal. In this connection we read on page 213 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," as follows: "Of a man it has been said, 'As he thinketh in his heart, so is he;' hence as a man spiritually understandeth, so is he in truth."

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