A dictionary says that "reach" means "the extent to which a person can stretch out the arm or hand, esp. so as to touch or grasp something." Parents, especially mothers, know the importance of putting things of value beyond the reach of young children. We are all familiar with the commonly used phrases "out of reach" and "within reach."

Mortals in general believe they are "within reach" of evil forces, sometimes actively identified in wrong-intentioned mortals, and often evidenced in forms of trouble and affliction which mortals seem unable to avoid or successfully to resist. The result is that many persons live in states of worry and fear, believing they are ever susceptible to the forces of evil.

Christian Science presents a different and comforting viewpoint. It challenges the verity of the whole material concept of cause and effect. The truth of being, it avers, is found only in the understanding that infinite Mind, Spirit, God, matter's opposite, is the one real cause, and that man and the universe, its effect, are spiritual, the expression of deific Mind. They coexist with, are constituted by, and contained in this Mind, and so are superior to and "out of reach" of all afflictive material, evil forces.

Accept the premise, presented by so-called mortal mind and its material senses, that man is a mortal living in matter, between two boundary stones of time, and you find, coincident with this sense of existence, the lurking belief that this mortal man is ever "within reach" of unintelligent forces that can impair, afflict, and destroy him.

Accept, and understand in some degree, the truth that man originates, not in slime and protoplasm, but in eternal Mind, is the individualized evidence of this Mind, constantly under Mind's absolute and intelligent control, and you begin to realize the spiritual truth that man is "out of reach" of evil forces, because he lives in Mind's realm, where these forces can never enter or usurp Mind's jurisdiction and control over its effect, man. Positive Truth, embracing its entire manifestation, is its own defense against every phase of negative error.

In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy, in discussing Christ Jesus' demonstration over death in the tomb, says (p. 43), "Out of reach of the barbarity of his enemies, he was acting under spiritual law in defiance of matter and mortality, and that spiritual law sustained him." Jesus was able to rise again because he spiritually understood that he was truly "out of reach of the barbarity of his enemies" and ever within the loving embrace of his Father, his Life, his Soul, and his All.

Forces that would threaten to bring inharmony, failure, sin, disease, and death into our experience can never touch, let alone get a grip upon, our spiritual, God-caused being. These forces are active only in the supposititious realm of false material thought. They are a danger only to the one who believes man's life is in matter rather than in God. In Christian Science we discover, in an ever-increasing measure, that our individuality, as Mind's reflection, is forever "out of reach" not of some but of all the material beliefs of sin, animality, hate, resentment, accident, loss, lack, homelessness, failure, and frustration.

We have, each one of us, the ability to control our own thinking. We can, by accepting the suggestion that our selfhood is what matter says it is, a fleshly body and a material mentality, put this mistaken sense of life, according to belief, "within reach" of the forces of evil. And we can by realizing from day to day, as did Jesus, the wholly spiritual nature of man as God's son, whose substance is Mind, and who is caused, controlled, and conditioned by Mind, find and feel the truth that man is forever "out of reach" of every evil force because he is ever at one with his God.

Sometimes one healed in Christian Science unintentionally gives evil power by believing that whereas he was once "within reach" of this particular disease or sin and Science has healed him, he may perhaps be afflicted again, in other words, come "within reach" of this evil again. He is believing that he is a mortal, as matter says; that he has in the past been reached and affected by afflictive material forces, been freed from them for the present, but that they may reach him again in the future.

What he needs to know is the spiritual fact that his God-constituted spiritual selfhood has never been "within reach" of evil, has never been conditioned or affected by it, has never known or felt its occurrence, and can never experience what error suggests as a recurrence. This is true because God, in whom man's life forever is, is forever beyond the touch or taint of evil, and therefore all that is of and in God must be, and is forever, equally "out of reach" of the totality of evil. What is false and suppositional never can touch the true and actual.

In the parable of Dives and Lazarus as recounted by the Master, Abraham says to Dives, who typifies the belief that life is in matter, as distinguished from spiritually-minded Lazarus, "Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed" (Luke 16:26). This is the unbridgeable gulf that separates material unreality from spiritual reality, evil from good, error from truth. You and I have the inalienable God-given ability to know that our spiritual selfhood in its forever oneness with Truth, Life, and Love is infinitely removed from all the suppositions of material belief. By aligning our sense of being with God, our Life and our Mind, and with God's spiritual law, the mighty, constructive forces of good, we can prove that our life is eternally beyond the reach of all enemies. We can prove, as did the Master, that there are no hostile forces threatening man.

So we bring to light the fact that the ignorant, disruptive, and destructive forces of evil called malpractice, sin, disease, and death have no power, means, or method by which they can ever reach our God-constituted selfhood, made by our Father "out of reach" of all that is evil, because it abides ever in Him and is the object of His continuing blessing and constant love.

Paul Stark Seeley