Article September 18, 1920 Issue

Christians are not Christians simply because they believe...

The Christian Science Monitor

Christians are not Christians simply because they believe the Bible to be true. They are Christians only as they realize for themselves the truth contained in the Bible. It may even be said that one is not actually a Christian until he realizes that the Bible is simply corroboratory evidence of what has been revealed to himself. This by no means belittles the Bible. Quite the reverse; it actually establishes it as the inspired and holy work that it is, one universally reverenced by thinking people.

Of course the vision of Truth which comes to an individual and thereafter justifies his claim to be called a Christian, was first presented to him in the Bible record of other men who had received the same revelation, but the mere presence of the record in the Bible does not make it true. It is in the Bible because it is true and not true because it is in the Bible. These Biblical narratives are presentations to the human consciousness of metaphysical truth through the medium of the written word. Now a word is but the invitation to entertain a definite idea. This invitation may be addressed to the human mind through the medium of sound or through the organs of sight, and we speak of it as either the spoken or the written word but the actual process in either case is wholly spiritual, for the obvious reason that idea can originate only in Mind,—in fact, is the action of Mind. So the only way in which true idea can be entertained or presented is through a spiritual process. What is ordinarily termed a conversation between persons, or an exchange of true ideas between a person and a book, is of course Mind being expressed, or if we call it the awareness of ideas we have said the same thing precisely. Obviously neither party to a conversation or to an exchange of right ideas—and there are in fact no others—creates the idea; he merely acknowledges it and by some token understood by all directs attention thereto.

Everybody concedes this in the realm of mathematics, which is the most nearly metaphysical of all human mental processes. No one believes himself to be the originator of an arithmetical fact. Even the most abstruse mathematical reasoning is seen to be merely consistent acknowledgment of what already exists and needs only to be apprehended, not something to be created by the mental effort of the individual. A person reciting the multiplication table, for instance, is not creating ideas; he is merely a witness to them. Nor is a person discoursing upon the beauties of a sunset creating ideas; he is being a witness to their existence. Now suppose, for a moment, that the multiplication table were being incorrectly recited; it would still be the effort to present mathematical ideas, but the statement of them would be erroneous. On page 277 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mrs. Eddy says, "Matter is an error of statement." May we not rightfully conclude that it is the erroneous statement about a sunset that makes it appear to be matter? Is it not obviously an erroneous statement to say that it has an origin in some power other than the one infinite cause, God? But never could there be the justifiable conclusion that there was no actual phenomenon of which the erroneous concept is the counterfeit! As well say that there is no multiplication table because it has been mistakenly recited! On page 87 of "Miscellaneous Writings," Mrs. Eddy is very explicit in this regard. She says: "To take all earth's beauty into one gulp of vacuity and label beauty nothing, is ignorantly to caricature God's creation, which is unjust tohuman sense and to the divine realism. In our immature sense of spiritual things, let us say of the beauties of the sensuous universe: 'I love your promise; and shall know, some time, the spiritual reality and substance of form, light, and color, of what I now through you discern dimly; and knowing this, I shall be satisfied.'"

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