Article April 9, 1921 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from John Kelman, George Eastman, Harding, Campbell-Ewald Co

["Face to Face"—The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, U.S.A., Feb. 3, 1921]

Christian Science may be said to be a religion of seeing face to face. Through an application of its teachings all phenomena are scientifically traced to their true source. All false beliefs, which are responsible for the bondage in which humanity finds itself, are dissolved by an understanding of the truth. Sickness is thus replaced by health, sin by holiness, and discord by harmony. Thus does the light of true knowledge, born of the divine Mind, dispel the darkness of mortal beliefs. And one sees, perhaps for the first time, that success in Christian Science is to be gained in the measure that one abandons the utterly false beliefs, predicated on life in and of matter, and puts on the new man, "which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness." Thus does a man strip off his disguise, as of the earth earthy, and he sees himself as man, the perfect image or reflection of God who is infinite Mind, Principle, and therefore not subject to any of the ills and limitations imposed by the so-called carnal mind. He is commencing to see face to face, to maintain his knowledge of God as infinite Spirit and man as the expression of Spirit, and therefore wholly spiritual. Scientific discernment alone lifts him into spiritual understanding, which he supports by actual demonstration. This true knowledge enables him to detect the chaff of ignorance, or materiality, and to separate it from the wheat of spiritual perception. Thus he finds that God is the sole activity, the one and only cause. He will rejoice, for he will have awakened to see himself as man, spiritual, and not material, created in the likeness of Mind, God, not theoretically, but actually and practically. He will recognize further what he previously failed to grasp, while accepting the testimony of material sense,—that, being a spiritual idea, man has always dwelt, is now dwelling, and will forever dwell in the domain of divine consciousness or Mind, and nowhere else. Through this metaphysical knowledge, or direct seeing, he will soon behold the fruits of the Spirit, expressed through love, peace, contentment, health, and harmony. He will know, for all time to come, that in reality the kingdom of heaven is here and now, on earth "as it is in heaven." And all the beliefs that have hampered his growth Spiritward, he will see, have no existence, in fact, for they must be outside of the realm of infinity, the one reality, which is impossible.

It is little wonder, therefore, that those who have been taught to believe that God is anthropomorphic, an enlarged material personality, should "see through a glass, darkly," and that their entire vision of God, or Principle, who is infinite, invisible, and incorporeal, should have been obscured. From the beginning of his study of Christian Science, the student is immeasurably helped by its elucidation of the fact that the Bible must be spiritually discerned. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, has made this extremely simple, and has pointed out this realization as a prerequisite to all healing. "The Bible teaches transformation of the body by the renewal of Spirit," writes Mrs. Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 241). Then follow these significant words: "Take away the spiritual signification of Scripture, and that compilation can do no more for mortals than can moonbeams to melt a river of ice." And thus the Christian Scientist is ever at work gleaning from the Bible its spiritual meaning. In this connection as in all others the Christian Science textbook and Mrs. Eddy's other writings are of inestimable value.

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