Article January 1, 1921 Issue

"Because God exists"

DOROTHY ROBERTS

"Matter cannot change the eternal fact that man exists because God exists," writes Mrs. Eddy on page 544 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." All there is to matter is the supposition that it can do what, as Mrs. Eddy here declares, it cannot, and that is, change a fact. This supposition that there can be a sustainer of existence other than God, Spirit, is manifest to itself as money, food, sleep, shelter, which can never become substantial, but are only the way sustaining cause seems to the supposed mind which is not God. Just as God is thus counterfeited, so His oneness with effect, man, is counterfeited, and we behold the universal belief that there is a kind of man who continues to exist,—be he saint or sinner, gross materialist or ascetic intellectual,—because money is, because sleep and food and shelter are. An individual can, such is the belief, only preach a sermon, write a poem, or invent an aeroplane,—engage in those activities which the human mind classifies as primarily mental or even spiritual,—only as he refreshes his brain with sleep, builds up his tissues with food, and fills his purse with earned or inherited money; and a nation must depend upon coal and climate and grain products if it is to survive.

What a man calls consciousness is often a network of preoccupations with that which he is one with, matter. It reverts with wearisome repetition to a round of trivial plans and anxieties, counts the days until the next pay envelope, figures the interest on an investment, already many times figured, prospects on the probabilities of a rise in rent, debates on what it shall have for lunch, struggles to get itself up in the morning and to bed at night, and snatches eagerly and wistfully at the possibilities of prolonging this sort of existence by diet, exercise, or even by the transference of glands from monkeys to men. In the national consciousness, so called, is a similar reversion to supposed cause, matter, a similar anxiety over the nation's lunch and its investments, and fearful speculation on what would happen should the "natural resources" of the country become exhausted.

What appears to-day as distressing shortages of individual and national resources is only the compulsion in thought of the truth about the infinite source of existence revealing the inevitable finity of the false supposition about it.

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