Article November 12, 1927 Issue

The Way

ALICE DAVIS SHELMIRE

In common parlance, human experience is one's journey through life. The phrase is predicated, however, on a false concept of life, that life has a beginning and an ending, and that man, once born, immediately begins his journey toward life's end, death. Christian Science, teaching that Life is God, makes it clear that Life could have no beginning or ending, because God never changes. Hence man, made in the image and likeness of his creator, is the expression of eternal Life, and can therefore no more have a beginning and an ending, be born or die, than can God. So it is evident that a journey, in a limited sense, through Life is impossible.

How, then, can the human experience of birth and death be accounted for? It is explained in Christian Science as the projection of a supposititious dream of life and intelligence in matter, the only evidence of which is testified to by the five physical senses, whose witness has ever been unreliable. It is not until the study of God and man as given to the world by Mary Baker Eddy through her writings, awakens us from this dream-sense of things that we begin to learn what living really is.

The awakening to spiritual facts is also spoken of as a journey—one, however, away from the false material sense of existence toward a full realization of what constitutes eternal being. This journey is an individual experience, a daily, hourly, constant effort to advance in the desired direction, to leave behind all the beliefs of sin and disease engendered by a false sense of life in matter, and to press steadily toward the goal of conscious unity with God. Each one of us, then, faring forth toward this goal, may be termed a traveler, a pilgrim, and being such is concerned with the way his steps shall take.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

The Way

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access