Article June 21, 1947 Issue

No Matter to Change

RUTH G. PRELL

Eager throngs were waiting outside a church edifice where a lecture on Christian Science was to be given. Presently, one student noticed a man who was crippled. Because she knew it was her duty to declare the truth about any inharmonious condition, she began to dwell upon the perfection of man as God's spiritual idea and found herself abstractly wishing that her understanding was such that matter might in that moment be changed from imperfection to perfection.

The next moment, however, she remembered this statement in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy (p. 395): "It is mental quackery to make disease a reality—to hold it as something seen and felt—and then to attempt its cure through Mind." At once she recognized what her wishful attitude implied, and saw that she had been regarding an erroneous condition as real and actually present and had wanted to make sick matter well. She had failed to remember that whatever material sense presents is an illusion, a false image of man in God's likeness. Now she realized that since the perfectibility of God and man alone constitutes reality, imperfection was not present; neither could it be changed into perfection, since perfection is the unalterable fact of the omnipresence of infinite Mind.

Mrs. Eddy writes (ibid., p. 485), "Science declares that Mind, not matter, sees, hears, feels, speaks." Therefore, the student knew that she could insist on man's spiritual status and declare with authority that she had never really seen the deformity, nor had anyone else.

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