Editorial December 13, 1947 Issue

"STICK TO THE TRUTH OF BEING"

Paul Stark Seeley

An essential quality of a postage stamp is its ability to stick to an envelope. If it does, the letter goes where it should. If the stamp does not stick, it fails to fulfill its purpose. Mary Baker Eddy uses the verb "stick" to indicate an essential requirement for a Christian Science treatment. She writes in the chapter on Christian Science Practice (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 418): "Stick to the truth of being in contradistinction to the error that life, substance, or intelligence can be in matter. Plead with an honest conviction of truth and a clear perception of the unchanging, unerring, and certain effect of divine Science."

The postage stamp accomplishes by sticking. The Christian Scientist, if he understandingly sticks to "the truth of being," accomplishes the healing purpose of his treatment. But just what is "the truth of being"? It is the true idea of creative cause and its effect; what else could be the truth of being? The true cause is self-existent intelligence, infinite Mind. The true effect is Mind's universal manifestation expressed in individual ideas or identities, the highest idea of which is man.

The destructible mortal sense of man, life, and substance, Christian Science does not accept as the effect of infinite, eternal Mind, God. Its unsubstantiality and its sin, strife, and discord cannot be representative of supreme intelligence. Science exposes this material sense of creation and man as the effect of a so-called mortal or material sense of mind, God's opposite, the basic evil. A Christian Scientist faces this issue in his treatment: Shall I accept as fact what the material senses argue to me is life, creation, and man, or shall I stick to the spiritual truth that God is Mind, and that the only universe and man is Mind's harmonious manifestation?

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