Editorial December 3, 1938 Issue

Impressions

Violet Ker Seymer

The Christian Scientist is on guard against accepting material sense impressions, well knowing this would prevent the discernment of spiritual individuality. Particularly is this lethargic habit to be guarded against when one arrives early at a church service, a lecture, or any place of assembly, lest one should absorb the impressions of people as they arrive—their stature, gait, age, dress, and so forth. One unwittingly embraces himself in these supine observations of material sense, and wastes moments which could be valuably employed in true witnessing.

False impressions are mental mesmerism, mortal mind's self-testimony appearing as persons and objects. These impressions are mortally mental, since matter, per se, cannot see or be seen, as Mrs. Eddy indicates in "Unity of Good" (p. 31). On page 35 of this work she writes: "The so-called material senses are found, upon examination, to be mortally mental, instead of material. Reduced to its proper denomination, matter is mortal mind; yet, strictly speaking, there is no mortal mind, for Mind is immortal, and is not matter, but Spirit." In spiritual fact, then, there are no mortally mental senses. No material impressions are either projected or received.

What are true impressions? Whence come they, and how are they conveyed? Our Leader gives us the answer on page 214 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," where she says, "When it is learned that the spiritual sense, and not the material, conveys the impressions of Mind to man, then being will be understood and found to be harmonious." Mind's impressions are consistent with their source, and spiritual sense apprehends these impressions in all their beauty and permanence. The manifold reflections of Spirit are substantial, perfect, indestructible. In Spirit nothing is material. In Mind nothing is impure. In Love nothing is fearsome. In Soul nothing is perishable. Triumphantly, then, we can reverse the belief of consuming disease or abnormal accretions. The so-called material sense-impressions are as unreal as the medium through which they are supposed to be conveyed. There is no such conveyance, since it is spiritual sense which "conveys the impressions of Mind to man."

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