Editorial September 18, 1948 Issue

WHAT IS HISTORY?

Robert Ellis Key

In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy writes (p. 225), "The history of our country, like all history, illustrates the might of Mind, and shows human power to be proportionate to its embodiment of right thinking." Conclusions drawn from this statement point to the fact that much of what we have been educated to regard as history is not so classified in Christian Science.

Historians record in great detail the wars, revolutions, and persecutions that have convulsed mankind, but these do not form any part of the history of the ideal man. Through the faculty of spiritual discernment the student of Christian Science learns to differentiate between the material and the spiritual. He rejects the theory of a material man inhabiting a material universe, the victim of material history, and accepts the Scriptural dictum (Gen. 1:27), "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."

It is essential to our progress as students of Christian Science that we reject the material sense of man and adopt the spiritual. If a clear distinction is not made between the spiritual and the so-called material, we may find ourselves drifting into the habit of regarding man as a mixture of Spirit and matter, good and evil, and thus incline towards material means for healing the sick by relying on drugs, electricity, or will power, instead of on the one Spirit. The transcendent power of divine Mind is demonstrated in works of healing only when every weight is put into the right scale. It is clear we cannot enhance the brilliance of the noonday sun by introducing the feeble flame of a lighted candle. When the radiance of spiritual existence is discerned, material modes become feeble and obsolete.

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