Like everyone else, the Christian Scientist is faced with the prophecies of a long war, of the bombing of cities, of the lack and depletion of their populations. As long as he is participating in a human society, he should be patient and loving in connection with the fears thus engendered, and in supporting wise human methods employed to secure protection and stability. The Christian Scientist can and does co-operate in bringing about such human measures and material defenses. While doing this, he should keep sufficiently alert and awake so that he may never swerve from his true sense of existence and security. He is in a position to meet the predictions of evil and the ways to protect himself in a different mental attitude from those as yet unenlightened by Mary Baker Eddy's revolutionary discovery.

Christian Science has made it possible for its earnest student to recognize that only the eternal, infinite, and good constitute the nature of God; and for that reason must be called basically real and ever present. Whatever appears as different from the divine has to be classified as utterly untrue and unreal, however true and real it may seem to be from within a human sense of existence.

The human sense of existence is avowedly finite, imperfect, and perishable. It pictures a doomed man in a material universe. Should an airplane appear in the blue sky intent to spread destruction, this is only incidental to the generally accepted destructible sense of existence. The danger is not primarily forthcoming from the outside, from the bomber; it comes from within, from a preconceived suggestion that man is a tiny speck within a destructible three-dimensional universe. If one accepts this suggestion, the only possible protection against the fiery explosion seems to be in digging oneself into the dust of the earth. A forceful illustration of the curse on Adam, or the human concept of man, "For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return"!

The world is fighting war, disaster, disease, from within the world's own destructible sense of existence, as stubborn realities. Hence the lack of success. Christian Science explains that the stability of one's times and the dominion of man are found in eliminating this human sense.

How this can be accomplished is indicated in the first chapter of Genesis. Here is found the divine pronouncement that dominion over all the earth belongs to that state of spiritual understanding conceiving of itself as divine likeness or manifestation, thereby universal in nature. And the conclusion may be drawn that dominion over all the earth does not belong to the state of belief beholding itself as a human person in a material world.

A different approach to the solution of the world's problems is thus provided. One is enabled to understand the unreality of that which is not in accordance with the nature of God. In other words, a problem can be solved only when the error involved is recognized to be a lie and not something true. Only as a lie can it be confronted with the truth and so dissolved. As long as one believes that which is erroneous to be true, such confrontation remains impossible.

Upon the recognition of the unreality of disease, the Christian Scientist has been able to heal diseases, even those designated as incurable by the doctors. They seem incurable to the latter because they are fighting disease as a reality. Even that which the physician calls a curable disease is not actually healed until one recognizes it as unreal.

The prophecies of doom and distress on the part of the medical faculty in connection with the human body, have been proved baseless in many cases. The physician's diagnosis is inevitably about his material concept of man. It is not about man as he really exists. "Immortal man was and is God's image or idea, even the infinite expression of infinite Mind, and immortal man is coexistent and coeternal with that Mind" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, p. 336). The physician's diagnosis cannot influence or harm anyone who has ceased identifying himself humanly, and is understanding himself divinely.

In a larger sense, the fear-instilling diagnosis about the future of the world and the predicting of national disaster are invariably about the human prophets' own material sense of existence. Consequently these predictions should not influence or harm the one who knows existence as it divinely is, and who is identifying himself as such.

It is upon this spiritual basis that one is able to recognize the all-reality of divine good and the utter unreality of every claim of sin, sickness, and death. In "Retrospection and Introspection" (p. 64), Mrs. Eddy forcefully expresses this as follows: "Since there is in belief an illusion termed sin, which must be met and mastered, we classify sin, sickness, and death as illusions. They are supposititious claims of error; and error being a false claim, they are no claims at all." In this manner, the false arguments making for war dwindle away.

The basic argument is fear, which is limitation: the fear that there is not sufficient good for all the nations of the world. Fear and greed are closely related; so is mad ambition, produced by a personal sense of existence. Mass propaganda hypnotically tries to enslave mankind to these forces of evil attempting to dominate the world and crush out the Christian concept of life and its freedom.

The Christian Scientist does not take in these baneful suggestions. He rejects them on the basis of their nothingness. He knows that they have no source, no reality, no activity, presence, or power, since God is All and therefore divine good is All. The Scientist does not believe in the procrastination of good and the prophecy of evil. Prophecy may imply a time element, something going to happen in the future. That which is prophesied as future good, when it is really or divinely good, exists now in the eternal presence of all-inclusive divinity. That which is predicted as a coming evil, be it a disease, an air attack, or an invasion, the Christian Scientist discerns as a false suggestion trying to materialize itself by first being mentally accepted as a possibility. The realization of the divine facts, here and now, precipitates more good into present experience, in the one instance; and in the other instance, prevents evil from appearing. Anyone having a premonition of evil should spiritually understand that such a suggestion must be taken only as an indication of what has to be specifically denied, and never accepted as a future possibility.

The human sense of existence appears to be thoroughly upset these days. Its cruelties, its prophecies of evil, its overturnings, its wars are explained in Christian Science as a result of the operation of Truth uncovering evil as nothingness and destroying it. All over the world is the active realization of the allness of God and the nothingness of material sense. This is having a marked effect upon this false sense. Consequently its fears and convulsions.

Those aware of the true nature of existence do not have to become confused and terrified; they do not have to catch the contagion of fear. Their position—as already mentioned—is entirely different and set apart. They have the privilege and power to live their Science and thus allay fear by not accepting it as a reality, nor at all, for themselves or for that which appears as the world.

In these days of the Science of Christianity, it is one's privilege and sacred duty to conceive of oneself, not any more as a fearing mortal, tossed to and fro, but as divine idea, as "the city [consciousness] of the living God" itself. Here is immunity from air raids and destruction, and herein is the "wisdom and knowledge" that "shall be the stability of thy times."

Copyright, 1942, by The Christian Science Publishing Society, One, Norway Street, Boston, Massachusetts. Entered at Boston post office as second-class matter. Acceptance for mailing at a special rate of postage provided for in section 1103, Act of October 3, 1917, authorized on July 11, 1918. Published every Saturday.