The Universe Spiritual

The orthodox world has been in agreement upon the fact that God is infinite, that God is Spirit, and that infinite Spirit is the great First Cause. For orthodoxy to go on believing in an effect wholly unlike the one and only cause, namely, a material universe, or a material anything, is utterly to abandon logic and reason. The philosophers of the world have been equally illogical. They have generally recognized a great first mental cause. Plato spoke of a self-moving intelligence as the first cause, and Aristotle described the first cause as a self-knowing reason. Nevertheless the philosophers have ignored the fundamental premise of spiritual cause in believing in a world of matter as effect, regardless of the quality of the one great cause. Moses and the prophets caught glimpses of the truth that the great First Cause being infinite Spirit, creation or the universe must be wholly spiritual. This discernment by the prophets of one creator and one creation, Jesus of Nazareth through demonstration and teaching perfected to the full vision of the Christ, for practical daily living. Jesus proved that the reality with which he was surrounded was the infinite spiritual idea, because Spirit is all there is; this he demonstrated by turning water into wine, multiplying the loaves and fishes, walking on water, bringing the ship immediately to the other side of the lake, and by many other works which humanity calls miracles. Through such demonstrations Jesus steadfastly acknowledged that the entire universe is actually spiritual, not material. It remained, however, for Mary Baker Eddy to develop the Science of Christianity or pure reasoning based on the teachings of Jesus and to discover and state a rule for the practice of this Science on the one and only true basis of one creator and one creation.

Starting with the basic self-evident proposition of existence which can be proved by each one by the simple appeal to consciousness, Christian Science, as taught by Mrs. Eddy, proceeds step by step, in perfect order, through pure reasoning to proof. It reveals that all right reasoning must have as its premise the great fact proclaimed in the textbook of Christian Science, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 468), that "all is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all." Since the eternal First Cause, God, Mind, Spirit, could not possibly create a supposititious opposite, the finite, the material, it is self-evident that the so-called finite, or material, has never been created and any claim of limitation or matter is nothing but the counterfeit of true creation. All that exists is Mind and its idea, these two which are in reality one, the All-in-all. The true idea is the spiritual universe including man. Man, then, is understood to be here and now living, moving, and having his being in the one and only universe, the spiritual universe. Spirituality consequently is not something which comes into being; it is, and it is all there is. The demand upon each one is to recognize this truth; to acknowledge in every thought and in his living, the allness of Spirit, thus acknowledging God as All. This is scientific Christian practice, which deals only with one true, spiritual creation. This is the reality with which one invariably deals; to deal with supposition as a reality is not possible within the logic of Science. Mrs. Eddy makes this vividly clear in an important chapter in "Miscellaneous Writings," on the subject "One Cause and Effect." She writes on page 27: "Creation, evolution, or manifestation,—being in and of Spirit, Mind, and all that really is,—must be spiritual and mental. This is Science, and is susceptible of proof. But, say you, is a stone spiritual? To erring material sense, No! but to unerring spiritual sense, it is a small manifestation of Mind, a type of spiritual substance, "the substance of things hoped for.' Mortals can know a stone as substance, only by first admitting that it is substantial. Take away the mortal sense of substance, and the stone itself would disappear, only to reappear in the spiritual sense thereof."

The reality of all things, then, is spiritual. Certainly the truth or idea of all reality, including the action or function thereof, is in Mind, quite apart from any limited concept which may have appeared to human sense. As Mrs. Eddy says on page 267 of Science and Health, "Every object in material thought will be destroyed, but the spiritual idea, whose substance is in Mind, is eternal." Only what the divine Mind knows is the reality of man, for generic man is the full reflection of the divine Mind, including all spiritual reality. It is no more scientific to say that something is nothing than to say that nothing is something. Christian Science is not a religion of denial but one of affirmation. More than unseeing matter, error, it reveals the truth to be in Mind in place of false belief appearing in the hypothetical human mind.