Article August 24, 1940 Issue

Progress through Evangelization of Self

RUTH EVELYN GROFFMAN

OF the evangelization of thought which Christian Science brings to mankind, our revered and beloved Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, on page 162 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," says, "The effect of this Science is to stir the human mind to a change of base, on which it may yield to the harmony of divine Mind." Christian Science is bringing to the world the good news of the kingdom, and through its activity the human mind is being cleansed and spiritualized. Truth is exposing the falsity of material belief, and so is freeing thought from materiality's blinding influence by revealing the reality and substantiality of God's spiritual creation.

Christ Jesus saw the imperative need for a recognition of our true, spiritual selfhood as God's own child, exchanging the material for the spiritual concept of man. In his conversation with Nicodemus, he swept aside the false argument about material life with the profound utterance, "Ye must be born again." Knowing the falsity of material sense, he showed the paramount necessity for spiritual birth, for an awakening from the mortal dream to the right concept of man as the son of God. "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." Jesus knew that as long as men put their reliance in matter and its laws they could not acknowledge and utilize the substantiality of Spirit's ideas, which are ever available to protect, sustain, and deliver from the woes of material thinking.

Mrs. Eddy states on page 254 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" that "the human self must be evangelized;" and she adds, "This task God demands us to accept lovingly to-day, and to abandon so fast as practical the material, and to work out the spiritual which determines the outward and actual." A dictionary defines the word "evangelize," in part, as "to convert to Christianity." In this work of spiritual evangelization, greater progress would be attained if the student, instead of limiting his efforts merely to trying to be a better mortal, strove to live his life from the standpoint of God's spiritual, perfect man. Then, when tempted by evil's supposititious allurements, he is enabled to stand, no matter in what attractive form error might present itself, and to rise up in spiritual strength and reject error.

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