Article August 28, 1943 Issue

God's Man Is Not Expendable

[Of Special Interest to Youth]

ARTHUR J. TODD

Recently , through military usage, a familiar term has acquired new meaning. "Expendable" is the precise word. Men and materiel are said to be "expendable," that is, liable to be used up in attaining certain military objectives. Some branches of the armed forces are said to be more expendable than others. Christian Science resolutely refuses to accept such rumors and the philosophy of life which underlies them; it boldly asserts, with a conviction born of spiritual understanding, that divine Principle, equal to every situation, however dire the emergency may seem to be, meets human need of every kind and description, wherever or whatever it may be. In short, according to Christian Science, because God is dependable, God's man is not expendable.

Mary Baker Eddy, the author of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," is positive on this point; for she makes it clear with irresistible logic that God could not create man with two lives. Writing of the Master's understanding of this fact, she says in Science and Health (p. 369), "He understood man, whose Life is God, to be immortal, and knew that man has not two lives, one to be destroyed and the other to be made indestructible." Her remarkable synonym for God—Principle —reveals a universe of order, law, regularity, organization, coherence, dependability. It declares a unifying, ever-acting, sustaining, beneficent power—omnipotence— the only power which holds this universe together, which links all creation to its creator.

Because spiritual man, the real man, is part of this grand spiritual creation, he is bound inseparably to his creator, is every instant in His presence. He cannot fall out of this creation, since it is infinite and there is nothing beyond it; he cannot be injured or destroyed by it, since it is not hostile to man's life or righteous activity, because it, like man, is the manifestation of infinite divine Love. God's man, His image and likeness, lives and moves and has his being in God, as Paul told the Athenians. That is why he could write to his Roman friends with such noble confidence that neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation is able to part us from God's love.

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