Article March 1, 1947 Issue

Dedication

JOHN M. TUTT

It makes a great difference what we conceive to be important. It makes a greater difference what we conceive to be of primary importance. Dedicating a church edifice is an important activity, and no one can deny that it should be accomplished. But the dedication of an edifice can be only of secondary importance. In fact it can be said to be only an important incident.

The larger and primary activity is the dedication of our lives to the true Church and to the purposes to which it is itself dedicated. This word "dedicate" means devotion or consecration to a serious and, in the case of our church, a holy Cause. A portion of the members cannot commit the entire church membership; they cannot dedicate the church body en masse. The dedication of our church to the work committed to it by our Master, Christ Jesus, and by our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, is the responsibility of every individual member, for only in the heart of each of us can dedication really occur.

The church body is not a mass consciousness. Consciousness is individual. God is the infinite Person, and that means the one Ego or self-conscious Being. Mrs. Eddy in her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," explains that man is an individual spiritual consciousness. This individual consciousness is individual man. She also uses the word "man" as a generic term and says (p. 475), "He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas; the generic term for all that reflects God's image and likeness."

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