"Seek ye first the kingdom of God"

ELFRIEDE EBBINGHAUS

In his understanding of helpful love, Christ Jesus said to hearts filled with anxiety: "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?" Would not one like to bring these words to-day before all despairing ones, suffering from fear and doubt, lack and sorrow? But would they believe them? And if not, what would hold them back? Ignorance of the living and true God. Men blindly submit to the domination of dead idols created by human belief, and are ever according power to them.

The words which Christ Jesus uttered over nineteen centuries ago have lost nothing of their value. To-day, Christian Science comes and proffers its help to the weary and heavy-laden in order to lead them to the understanding of life eternal, so that they may become free from sorrow, tribulation, fear, and anxiety. It says, "Let there be light." It reveals true Being, the only real habitation of man, the child of God. It unfolds the truth about the one creator, God, and shows Him to be, not the manlike God of the children of this world, but the God whom Mrs. Eddy defines in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 465) as "incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love."

As a work of art expresses the thought of the artist, so the divine creation reflects the creator. Since God is Spirit, creation must be spiritual. As the expression of "incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind," creation is incorporeal,—the infinite idea. Thus the so-called material world is not God's creation; it is but a counterfeit of the true. There is but one creative "I"—the divine Mind; and but one universe—Mind's divine universe, peopled by divine ideas. Mrs. Eddy tells us in Science and Health (p. 503), "These ideas range from the infinitesimal to infinity, and the highest ideas are the sons and daughters of God." They have their being in Mind. Nothing can extinguish or annihilate them, because there is no power other than Mind. The true man, the child of God, is "the compound idea of infinite Spirit; the spiritual image and likeness of God; the full representation of Mind" (Science and Health, p. 591). How wonderfully Mrs. Eddy expresses in these terse words the nature of man as the child of God!

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