Editorial August 21, 1926 Issue

Mind and Its Manifestation

Albert F. Gilmore

Mrs. Eddy penned no more revolutionary words than the "scientific statement of being," which appears on page 468 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." This brief paragraph, in denying the claim of the material universe to entity and power, challenges the philosophies of all time. Of tremendous significance are these brief sentences, which posit Deity and the true creation as the entity of all reality. "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation" leaves no possibility of reality or existence apart from God and His infinite spiritual universe.

Thoughtful persons had been quite ready to conceive of the creative power as intelligent, but none before our Leader had proclaimed God as infinite and all-inclusive Mind, creator of the perfect universe of divine ideas. Mrs. Eddy's statement positively denies the possibility that entity or substance can inhere in the objects of personal sense, which in their most substantial aspects are, upon analysis, found to be but the objective forms of material belief.

On page 27 of "Miscellaneous Writings" Mrs. Eddy sets this forth in the metaphysical discussion of a stone. After stating that matter in all forms and evil of every phase are nonexistent, are nonentities and negations, she asks if a stone is spiritual, replying, "To erring material sense, No! but to unerring spiritual sense, it is a small manifestation of Mind, a type of spiritual substance." And after further stating that it has the qualities which are commonly attributed to substance, that is, that it is substantial, she writes this most instructive sentence: "Take away the mortal sense of substance, and the stone itself would disappear, only to reappear in the spiritual sense thereof."

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