Article May 19, 1923 Issue

I have before me a letter of recent date from a Spokane...

Louis E. Scholl, Committee on Publication for the State of Washington,—Spokane

Spokesman-Review

I have before me a letter of recent date from a Spokane minister who says, "I have usually found Christian Scientists anxious to be in love with truth and moral honesty. I have no quarrel with them." It is the Christianity of the Christian Scientists' religion that makes them in love with truth and moral honesty.

Many theologians stoutly declare heaven to be a literal, material place whose shores we cannot touch until after the change called death. Christian Science has a more Scriptural and so more rational conception of heaven than this, for it is quite in agreement with Jesus' words, "The kingdom of God is within you." Christian Science teaches that heaven is a state of harmonious, divine consciousness and, as such, is not a remote, but a present, possibility. On page 536 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy she says: "In St. John's vision, heaven and earth stand for spiritual ideas, and the sea, as a symbol of tempest-tossed human concepts advancing and receding, is represented as having passed away. The divine understanding reigns, is all, and there is no other consciousness."

In Science and Health (p. 480) Mrs. Eddy says, "If sin, sickness, and death were understood as nothingness, they would disappear." The word "understood" is of great importance here. To understand is far different from any careless ignoring of a condition. To understand sin as useless and powerless, and wholly incapable of giving pleasure or happiness; to understand it as a type of sickness, even insanity, is to see it in all its naked nothingness. This is the first step to be taken in the destruction of sin. It is by this mental process that Christian Science succeeds in accomplishing the destruction of "the works of the devil," for which purpose, we are told in the epistle of John, "the Son of God was manifested."

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