Article September 20, 1919 Issue

Christian Scientists study the same Bible used by other...

Robert G. Steele

Unionville (Mich.) Crescent

Christian Scientists study the same Bible used by other Christian denominations, the Authorized Version or King James Bible. They are constant, consistent daily students of its pages, and Christian Science has undoubtedly produced more earnest students of God's Word than any other single agency.

The teaching of Christian Science relative to heaven and hell is precisely that of Christ Jesus; namely, that neither one is a place or locality to which one is transported after death, the first to be attained only by those who are good, and the second the abode of those who have sinned. The Master, in his reply to the Pharisees' demand as to when the kingdom of God should come, said, "Behold, the kingdom of God is within you." He thus indicated that heaven is a present possibility attainable here and now to those who understand his teaching. It is therefore a state of consciousness. Hell, heaven's suppositional opposite, is therefore an opposite state of mind. Mrs. Eddy makes this plain on page 266 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," where she writes, "The sinner makes his own hell by doing evil, and the saint his own heaven by doing right." Being good through fear of punishment or hope of reward never made man truly righteous. Right thinking and right acting as a result of a knowledge of God, good, is the only Christlike way, and this is the teaching of Christian Science.

The members of no religious denomination in the world believe more implicitly in true prayer or use it more constantly than do Christian Scientists. Theirs is not the prayer of supplication and petition only, asking God, as one would an earthly father, to change His mind and bestow something hitherto withheld, but the true prayer of realization and affirmation of God's allness, of His goodness, of His boundless love, and of the real man's relation to Him as His spiritual image and likeness, through which man, reflecting all that God is, has all that God has. This prayer, through the understanding of our spiritual relationship to God, brings us into at-one-ment with Him, and places us in position to realize our holy and right desires.

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