Editorial November 9, 1946 Issue

No Substitute for Spiritual Reality

Paul Stark Seeley

In daily experience no one likes to accept a substitute for the original product, yet this is just what mortals have done and are doing in regard to life and manhood. Christian Science shows the impossibility of the transient, material concept of life ever being actually substituted for spiritual reality.

A careful reader of the four Gospels will be impressed with the fact that Christ Jesus had a clear understanding of God and a correct valuation of evil. With his understanding of God and His work, he annihilated evil and its work. The understanding he had is yours and mine to have, and with it to demonstrate the health, holiness, and immortality which evidence spiritual reality.

Jesus understood God to be not a magnified human person, but the source and Father, the Life of all. Spirit, he said, is God; and Spirit is Mind, intelligence. The nature of evil he exposed when he told the wrong-minded Pharisees that their thinking was fathered by the devil, evil, which he called a liar. He wanted men to recognize evil as a lie, a false sense of mind evidenced in all wrong-mindedness. Mary Baker Eddy writes, "A lie has only one chance of successful deception,—to be accounted true" (Unity of Good, p. 17). Christian Science helps us to stop accepting material existence as true, as reality, and to see it as the lying misconception of existence—the would-be substitute for the spiritual facts of being.

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