First and Always

WILLIAM B. HARRISON

Few passages of Scripture are more often quoted than this: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." Correctly interpreted, the passage is rich with meaning; but its true import may be lost, if the word "first" is overemphasized. If we believe that our proper attitude is to seek God's kingdom and His righteousness before we seek other things, and that these other things—material things—will then come to us as a natural and legitimate reward for having given God the preference, we are in error. So-called orthodox religion sanctions this interpretation, because it fails to discern the real meaning of the Scriptural passage. Outside of Christian Science, the belief is all too general that if one strives to be good, this striving will be rewarded materially, notwithstanding that countless instances could be cited where individuals who strove earnestly and sincerely to live upright, pure, and holy lives seem to have received, in return for these efforts, suffering, sickness, and even want.

In the passage quoted, the word "first" does not seem to be an essential part of the Scriptural text. Luke omitted it entirely in reporting the same statement of the Master. His account of Jesus' words was as follows: "But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you." The omission is not without significance, and is easily understood in the light of Christian Science, which reveals that there is but one kingdom, the kingdom of God. In it is no evil, sickness, want, or inharmony of any kind. That kingdom contains in itself all that exists in reality. Matter and its claims to reality and substance are a direct contradiction of the allness of God and His kingdom. Not a single quality of matter exists in the realm of God; and there is no other realm or region; therefore there is no place for matter to exist. Matter, so called, is only a false sense of substance and life; and this inharmonious material sense disappears as the false sense is corrected with the truth.

So, when Jesus told his hearers to seek the kingdom of God, he was trying to lift their thoughts into the realm of divine Truth, where none of the claims of materiality have presence or power. Once let consciousness comprehend, even in a degree, the omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience of infinite good, and every need would be met; because we should then understand that man lives in Love's perfect atmosphere.

There is little essential difference between the Master's statement about seeking the kingdom of God and that other scarcely less quoted one, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." What is this truth? Is it not the fact of God's perfect kingdom, eternal, infinite, ever present, the only reality? This truth, understood, lifts above the mesmerism of matter, and silences the discords of sense. So also, when the Master began his three years' ministry, he announced that he had come to preach the gospel (good news); and he commanded men everywhere to repent, for "the kingdom of God is at hand." The word "repent" means to change completely the thought about the subject in hand; in this case, the kingdom. That is the meaning of the Greek word translated "repent." And that which they were to repent of, or completely change their thought about, was the common belief that God's kingdom was afar off; that it could be reached only through death; and that a real material kingdom existed in which they were living as material beings.

Jesus declared, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand." He strove to raise the thought of his hearers to comprehend spiritual life as a present fact and the only truth about existence, although contradicted by material sense. Hence, if they would seek that life or kingdom, if they would permit the light of Truth to flood their consciousness until the darkness of error were driven out, "all these things," that is, all the seeming needs of humanity, would be more than supplied by the conscious presence of infinite goodness, reflected or expressed in God's man.

In the allegory of the garden of Eden, the same idea is expressed thus: "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Note that the fruit against which man is warned is a "knowledge of good and evil," the belief in an evil power existing in opposition to good. Evil cannot be real, if good is infinite. Hence a so-called knowledge of evil must be false knowledge, or a lie. Belief in this lie, the allegory says, drove Adam from the recognition of absolute good; and this lie is the barrier that still separates us to-day from that realm of perfect beauty and happiness to which, as children of God, we are heirs.

To seek the kingdom of God, then, is to strive to lift thought above the dream of material existence, with its turmoil of pain and pleasure, worry and want, sickness and suffering, disease and death, into the pure atmosphere of spirituality, by understanding something of the infinite goodness of God, of the eternal perfection of His creation, of the all-inclusive and eternal nature of spiritual reality, ruling out every possibility of the existence of any other life or state of existence. This must be the constant effort, first and always, of the student of Christian Science. As Paul expressed it, we must always be endeavoring to put off the old man and to put on the new. This process is clearly stated by Mrs. Eddy on page 167 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" in the following words, worthy of constant attention by every student of Christian Science: "We apprehend Life in divine Science only as we live above corporeal sense and correct it."

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