Article February 18, 1939 Issue

Maintaining a High Standard of Living

NATALIE G. FORCE

The world has heard much in the present era of what is called a high standard of living, the expression being applied to the conditions regarded as essential to maintaining a person or class in an accepted status. But as it has become generally recognized that a large proportion of the desired possessions are attained at the price of habitual debt and through the sacrifice of the greater good to the lesser, many thinkers are realizing that there must be something wrong with the standard of measurement.

Christian Science exposes the fallacy of reasoning based on the assumption of the reality and substantiality of matter, and supplies the gauge by which to measure the scale of human living by its approximation to the spiritual. The real man, Christian Science declares, is the image and likeness of God. He lives at the standpoint of spiritual activity, opportunity, and dominion. He is dependent upon the infinite resources of Mind, possessing, through reflection, limitless spiritual ideas. The mortal concepts of poverty and riches are unknown to God and the real man.

So persistent is error in its attempts to hold thought in thralldom to the illusory sense of life in matter, and so craftily disguised are some of its arguments, that habitual alertness is required to reject the suggestions that may seem to come through one's own thinking or from outside sources that would materialize his aims. Demonstration in Christian Science is primarily mental liberation from some phase of the belief that man lives in and is dependent upon matter. God is the source of abundance and right activity, and when we are faced with some opposite claim of error it is an indication, not that we need to get some material thing, but that we need a better understanding of spiritual man. When the truth about any situation is clearly realized, the outward improvement is seen to be not an end in itself but a manifestation of spiritually liberated thought.

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