Article November 1, 1930 Issue

Substance

MABEL CONE BUSHNELL

Watching a group of airplanes, a student of Christian Science found herself analyzing these fleet birds of the air; and as she puzzled over what they might represent, it became evident to her that uplifted thought, soaring above the earth-bound forms of limited transportation, was the nucleus of the invention that to-day thrills the world and is so rapidly helping to eliminate time and distance. Our forefathers unquestionably would have scoffed at the possibility of these huge planes flying through space in safety. Oxcart, horse and wagon, train, and automobile—each came in its order in the line of progress, but each appeared to have some measure of safety in solid ground beneath its wheels, and men felt safe in them because terra firma held them up.

Following this reasoning, the student found herself endeavoring to understand more completely what substance really is. It is not terra firma; it is not what the world calls solidity. This becomes evident as one considers the progress of the ages, as expressed, for example, in the airplane and the radio. Then what is substance? Mind is substance. No other answer is possible. Mrs. Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 508), "The only intelligence or substance of a thought, a seed, or a flower is God, the creator of it." God, Mind, expressed in ideas, is the substance, then, of the universe.

In the busy streets of to-day the vision of Nahum, the Elkoshite, would seem to be prophetically true: "The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall justle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings." The belief of speed, which to-day holds hurrying nations in its grasp, is merely the counterfeit of that immediacy which is one element of substance; for Mind is here and now, and is always actively expressed.

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