Editorial September 23, 1944 Issue

The Substance of Ideas

Margaret Morrison

Although this fact is not generally acknowledged, it is none the less true that the teachings of Christian Science have operated to liberate and change the thinking of men in all fields of human endeavor, of philosophy, therapeutics, and science. No concept of the human mind has been more radically changed by the teachings of Christian Science than has its concept of substance. But while physical scientists are gaining many clearer concepts of substance as mental, they have not yet visioned the reality of substance as it was demonstrated by Christ Jesus.

On page 257 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy writes, "Mind creates His own likeness in ideas, and the substance of an idea is very far from being the supposed substance of non-intelligent matter." Jesus always went beyond a humanly mental concept of substance to the actual spiritual idea—whose source is very substance itself. To him Spirit and its ideas were actual substance, and matter purely an illusion of the senses. This enabled him to go through what appeared to be substantial matter doors, and to roll away the stone from the tomb.

Again, on page 475 of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy, defining man, says. "He is the compound idea of God including all right ideas." Man, then, lives, functions, and is manifested as idea, not as a physical organism, and he is maintained forever safe, eternal, and indestructible in the infinite Mind of which he is the expression. True substance spells safety. Everything that is worthy of love, that we prize and praise, is utterly safe in the substance of Mind, incapable of being impaired, lost, or separated. There can be no separation in omnipresence. Love is omnipresence, and Love, while individualizing, unites, never separates, its ideas.

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