Article November 4, 1939 Issue

Fact and Fable

LOUISE KNIGHT WHEATLEY COOK

Our revered Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, has written (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 129), "If you wish to know the spiritual fact, you can discover it by reversing the material fable, be the fable pro or con,—be it in accord with your preconceptions or utterly contrary to them."

The great fact for all time and eternity is that God is All, the only presence, power, cause, and creator. Another basic fact is that man is God's image and likeness. Man is, because God is. He is the effect of perfect cause, so must exist at the standpoint of perfection; and his spiritual status is unassailable and unalterable. He knows no bonds or limitations, because God knows none. He needs nothing, because he already possesses all good. Man is God's satisfied idea.

This is the truth about man. Yet the events of our human experience point to the exact opposite. Through many active agencies, such as the radio, the average daily newspaper, the magazine advertisement, an effort is made to convince one that the fact is false and the fable is true—that instead of being spiritual, man is material; that instead of being perfect, everything seems to be going wrong with him most of the time; and instead of being God's complete idea, he apparently lacks much which he needs to make him well and to keep him happy. We are supposed to be living in "a mad world, my Masters!" as Hamlet put it, a sad world, an ugly, war-torn world, steadily growing worse, a fabulous invalid, so ill that it is fast disintegrating into its original state of "chaos and old night."

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