Editorial May 14, 1921 Issue

The Disappearance of Human Beliefs

Gustavus S. Paine

The work of Christian Science is not to make over a weak, diseased, or unhappy mortal into an immortal enjoying a state of bliss. The real redemption from sin, disease, and death is a process by which mortality disappears in the presence of the spiritual immortality which always has been going on even while illusory human experiences may have been supposed to obscure it. Salvation means, of course, saving, and what is saved or preserved eternally, both now and throughout the true past and true future, is the spiritual idea which is the real man. Because mortal belief is wholly bad, it never can be saved; nor can there be a halfway stage, partly good and partly bad, to be saved or redeemed. That which alone is actual is already saved, with the everlasting salvation of which Mrs. Eddy speaks, on page 261 of "Miscellaneous Writings," where she says: "Jesus said, 'I came not to destroy the law,'—the divine requirements typified in the law of Moses,—'but to fulfil it' in righteousness, by Truth's destroying error. No greater type of divine Love can be presented than effecting so glorious a purpose. This spirit of sacrifice always has saved, and still saves mankind; but by mankind I mean mortals, or a kind of men after man's own making. Man as God's idea is already saved with an everlasting salvation." Thus the suppositional mortal is saved just in proportion as his mortality gives way to the actuality of Principle, God, ever manifest as spiritual order.

Improved belief in mortality is, then, that which is disappearing, because its unreality is turning to the divine Mind and the true manifestation. If darkness or a mirage could be thought of as turning to and subsiding before omnipresent light, this might give a hint of the process going on through Christian Science practice; but any such material illustration is faulty just because it is material and hypothetical. Since the entire belief in matter and mortality is hypothetical in the same way, it is difficult to discuss, for the discussion of utter nothingness is in truth an impossibility. Real analysis eliminates the whole false belief and finds instead the true idea, intact, harmonious, forever untouched by suppositional illusions.

For each one, therefore, the right way of working in Christian Science is not to cling to the belief that he is still mortal and imperfect but to declare and prove for himself man's present immortality, for only in this way can he rejoice in the disappearance of false beliefs. As long as a man stoutly maintains that he is still human or mortal, with the various limitations of such a state of thinking, he will seem so, because his every argument is a struggle to perpetuate the illusion. Yet all the while the only real man is immortal, perfect, free, quite apart from any condition of false belief. It is, in fact, merely a classification of supposititious mortal mind that considers some states of human thinking better than others, since whatever is not wholly good must yield to the divine harmony.

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