Editorial March 16, 1929 Issue

Creation Spiritual

Albert F. Gilmore

The tendency of mortals to accept as reliable the testimony of the physical senses regarding creation is both marked and general. Because these senses have no cognizance of Spirit and of the true creation, which is spiritual, the evidence thus presented is wholly of the material world, of man as born of woman and therefore material. Material sense has no knowledge of reality, of God and His perfect universe. No knowledge of the realm of Spirit can be gained through physical sense. Knowledge of God and man, of all reality, must be gained through some other medium; and Christian Science makes it very plain that this understanding is gained only through spiritual sense—through faith, hope, intuition, righteous prayer.

The necessity facing every mortal, in order to win salvation from the restrictions which matter seems to impose, is to make his way from matter to Spirit; to change from a material to a spiritual basis of thinking; to envisage man as wholly spiritual. This process is facilitated as we deny human history; that is, as we deny, with understanding, that man, God's image, has ever passed through the experience of material birth, of a period of adolescence to be crowned by a season of maturity, and then of decline and decrepitude until death ensues. All this falsity belongs to the fundamental erroneous belief of material fatherhood and motherhood, which ignores the one Father-Mother God. In commenting on "human frailty" in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 190), Mrs. Eddy states the case precisely: "Human birth, growth, maturity, and decay are as the grass springing from the soil with beautiful green blades, afterwards to wither and return to its native nothingness." And she makes clear that material experience, which is but seeming and temporal, never merges into the real, the spiritual, but ultimately disappears as the facts of Being, the truth about God, man, and the real universe, appear.

It is the holding to material experience as real and to the history of the mortal as the truth about man that occasions the long period of bondage. Christian Scientists are engaged in the work of lessening the seeming reality of material experience, through gaining some understanding of man as the blessed son of God. Man, then, as the offspring of God has never known a material birth; has had no beginning in a material conception of existence; was never born into matter. Man as coexistent with God and coeternal with Him has always existed; hence has never known a beginning. The belief of man as mortal is inevitably associated with the belief of time; but the real man is known only in eternity. What, then, becomes of the common belief of material birth —of a birthday before which the individual supposedly had no existence? It seems to be a phase of the illusion which attaches to the false concept of man and creation, an illusion to be dispelled by turning on the searchlight of Truth, which dispels the least semblance of material darkness.

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