Editorial December 3, 1949 Issue

THE GREAT ATTAINMENT

George Channing

Whoever trusts divine Spirit understandingly will be rewarded with proof that his trust is well placed. Whoever trusts matter will have to correct his mistake. From those two statements and their implications can be deduced the whole objective of the Christian Scientist. Only in God, divine Spirit, can man put his trust, for Spirit alone is substance. Matter, the so-called opposite of Spirit, is untrustworthy, because it is illusion. To the alignment of thought with these facts and to the keeping of it so aligned, the Christian Scientist's effort is dedicated.

God, divine Spirit, is responsible for the spiritual ideas He conceives. He not only creates them, but maintains them. Individualized as man, they know their divine source, its requirements of them, and its responsibility for their eternal and perfect existence. Each individual, then, in proving himself to be man, that is, proving himself to be constituted of God's spiritual ideas or qualities, is simultaneously aware of what to trust and what not to trust. Endowed with this awareness, such an individual inevitably places confidence in what can be depended upon, and in nothing else.

Humanly considered, the ability to place trust correctly is cultivated. It unfolds from the acceptance of the fact that God is the Father of man and from the progressive recognition of what that fact means in terms of the true nature of the individual. It is attested by exposure to consciousness not only of that which is untrustworthy, but also of the spurious nature of the so-called evidence which asserts that the untrustworthy is worthy.

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