Article May 15, 1926 Issue

Universal Availability of Good

GLADYS C. FULTON

"Christian Science strongly emphasizes the thought that God is not corporeal, but incorporeal,—that is, bodiless," Mrs. Eddy tells us in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 116). In these words the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science swings the ax of truth at the root of all the false limitations that anthropomorphism would attempt to put upon Deity. The limitations of such false belief are many and varied; but, primarily, the belief that God is a magnified mortal, residing in a locality beyond the clouds, has made Him seem far removed from daily experience. In order to be ever and everywhere available, God must be limitless, infinite; and corporeality can never be either. A mortal form or shape, however magnified, could not "fill heaven and earth," could not be "a God at hand," as the prophet Jeremiah pictures Deity.

"A corporeal God, as often defined by lexicographers and scholastic theologians, is only an infinite finite being, an unlimited man,—a theory to me inconceivable," our beloved Leader writes on page 102 of "Miscellaneous Writings;" and in the following paragraph she says: "His [God's] infinity precludes the possibility of corporeal personality. His being is individual, but not physical." The error of attempting to limit God, in form or outline, has prevented mankind from understanding and demonstrating His omnipresent availability. Indeed, this misconception of God has opened the portals of human consciousness wide to needless fear, doubt, discouragement, suffering, and disaster. On the other hand, to touch even the hem of the understanding that God is incorporeal and, consequently, ever and everywhere available, makes freedom from the burdens of sense, which have heretofore seemed unavoidable, possible here and now.

That the prophets of the Old Testament understood in some degree the incorporeality of God is evidenced by the fact that the original Hebrew terms used to designate God mean, in part, power and might. Moses, the great Hebrew leader, must have caught gleams of the true nature of God when, in answer to the request that God tell him His name, God answered, "I AM THAT I AM."

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