Editorial January 1, 1921 Issue

The Value of Money

Gustavus S. Paine

If asked what money is, almost any one can answer glibly that it is a medium of exchange. Few stop to consider, however, what it really is that is exchanged or how the process actually goes on. Most people would say offhand that material commodities are the basis for the transaction of business. Yet the commodities themselves would be valueless without some sort of a mind to conceive of them as desirable, useful, and satisfying. In fact, all one has of any seeming thing is one's concept of it. Reasoning briefly in this way, one must recognize that the so-called material thing is just a belief in what Christian Science terms the mortal mind, and that it is this mind which supposes itself able to determine utility and value. In human affairs, then, the commodities are exchanged not as mere matter but as the suppositional mortal mind's concepts, known as goods. The whole volume of business in the world is but an exchange of these concepts, a process carried on by the human mind, which is itself only hypothetical.

Thus to see the mental nature of the process of exchange is not alone enough to enable one to discern the true spiritual activity in place of the human seeming. This sort of explanation of goods as human concepts is simply elementary political economy. Christian Science, in explaining and demonstrating the reality of value or of any other entity, does not stop with mortal concepts. As Mrs. Eddy says on page 123 of Science and Health, "Divine Science, rising above physical theories, excludes matter, resolves things into thoughts, and replaces the objects of material sense with spiritual ideas." All this seeming human exchange of goods is but suppositional counterfeit of the continuously varied activity eternally unfolding in the divine Mind, which is infinite and all that really exists. There could not even seem to be a mortal mind with its beliefs unless there is first the true Mind expressing itself as spiritual idea. The fact is that existence in infinite Mind is the only true living there is.

The truth that there is one boundless divine Mind manifesting itself as harmonious spiritual action does not rest on any system of human philosophy. Though human philosophy may have developed some basis for belief in one supreme God, no human philosophy has ever established the demonstrable truth that the idea, or activity, of the one perfect Principle is the Christ, which replaces all manner of human limitations with the abundance of spiritual good. It has remained for Christian Science to show that the Christ is available to-day for the healing of the world's false beliefs through the replacement of them with the divine idea.

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