Editorial January 7, 1922 Issue

"The whole earth is at rest"

Gustavus S. Paine

Any one can be calm and happy when human things are going to his liking. The test for the Christian Scientist comes when his experience seems a series of petty and important clashings intermingled, with stampedes of evil apparently routing good and the stupidity and infamy of others whirling past his point of observation. Then is when the understanding of Principle counts, the understanding that the having, the expressing, of infinite Mind, is the whole of living now and is good. Accepting the reality of Mind and its idea in the very midst of earthly chaos, one proceeds serenely in the proving that the unfoldment of immortal Life as spiritual action is omnipresent, even where suppositional mortal mind suggests the opposite. By realizing that earth is idea, not matter, one can always rejoice with Isaiah that the whole earth is full of the glory of Principle; for, as Mrs. Eddy explains on page 585 of Science and Health, "To material sense, earth is matter; to spiritual sense, it is a compound idea."

The utterly illusory mortal mind never really desires attainment, but sets up all its nothingness against the energetically peaceful and successful operation of the divine Mind. Thus the prince in "The Joy of Living," by Sudermann, translated by Edith Wharton, laments that "attainment means being nailed fast—nailed to a cross, sometimes." Yet the real man, the spiritual idea living ever in accord with infinite Life, exists eternally at the point of attainment, quite apart from any sense of human struggle and futility; or to put it in another way, at the very time and in the very circumstances when mortality seems to rage, even there Mind's immortal expression is omnipresently accomplished with harmony and vigor.

So what difference does it make if mortal mind argues that there is no peace in the world to-day, that aims are thwarted, that calumnies and recriminations about international or personal affairs fly hither and thither, or even that the reality of healing and happiness is attacked by all sorts of vicious suggestions? The accusation, intended by mortal mind to obstruct the unfoldment of good, may seem to present itself as a suggestion of disease, either supposedly in a human organism or in the organization of society. In either case, it never touches, cannot touch, the actuality of Mind and idea; and in proportion as a man is demonstrating Mind's manifestation for himself and rejoicing that it constitutes all the world there is for him, he finds his progress untouched by the attacks.

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