Editorial August 25, 1923 Issue

Spirit's Supremacy

Ella W. Hoag

The Christian world for centuries has talked of God's supremacy. It has again and again proclaimed Him to be omnipotent. In the very next breath, however, it has spoken as loudly of another power called evil, even questioning of the two powers which was the greater. Because of appearances it has imagined itself obliged to concede preeminence to evil, although it has still hoped that in a future heaven God might be proved to be superior. Not understanding the nature of God as all good, it has failed to comprehend evil's opposite supposititious nature, and so its conclusions have all been correspondingly ignorant.

Now the very word "supremacy" indicates neither a superior nor an equal; and to whom can this term be properly applied except to the one only God whom Jesus named "Spirit," and of whom he further said, "They that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth"? When Mrs. Eddy tells us in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 138) that "the supremacy of Spirit was the foundation on which Jesus built. His sublime summary points to the religion of Love," she opens wide the door to the possibility of proving, not only the all-power and reality of God, who is Spirit and is good, but also the powerlessness and unreality of Spirit's suppositional opposite, matter or evil.

Jesus' entire teaching accentuated the all-power and allpresence of Spirit as well as the nothingness of matter; and there is no statement of his more familiar to the Christian Scientist than the one he made to his disciples when he told them, "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." For the adherents of Christian Science to meet the demands this statement makes,—that they shall prove this true,—is the problem with which every Christian Scientist is faced.

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