Editorial July 16, 1949 Issue

THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD

Helen Wood Bauman

What the attributes of God are, how they pertain to man, God's likeness, and the way in which they are demonstrable in human experience are profound questions which relate to every Christian Science healing. Christian Science reveals the attributes of God as the absolute divine forces of His character. They are the essential properties of His nature, the constituent energies of being which Deity pours forth in the creation of a boundless spiritual universe of ideas. Mary Baker Eddy names such qualities as intelligence, love, wisdom, and immortality as attributes of God. These and countless others are tributary to divine Mind and are individualized, or made individual, in the ideas which that Mind creates.

God identifies His offspring by His own attributes, which man expresses; and in demonstrations of Christian Science we see spiritual man, intact and perfect, emerging from the obscuring mist of the animal nature in such qualities as harmony, uprightness, and kindness, which individuals display. Christian Science reveals real selfhood and dispels the illusion of evil qualities which seem to hide it. Anyone who is humble enough to acknowledge God's allness and his own perfection as God's idea rejoices in an increasing revelation of that idea. Mrs. Eddy says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (pp. 1,2): "Meekness heightens immortal attributes only by removing the dust that dims them. Goodness reveals another scene and another self seemingly rolled up in shades, but brought to light by the evolutions of advancing thought, whereby we discern the power of Truth and Love to heal the sick."

Christian Science explains man as not only characterized by but constituted of God's attributes, for Mind's ideas embody the characteristics of Mind. Mrs. Eddy sets forth this fact in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," where she states (p. 76), "The sinless joy,—the perfect harmony and immortality of Life, possessing unlimited divine beauty and goodness without a single bodily pleasure or pain,— constitutes the only veritable, indestructible man, whose being is spiritual." Not only sinless joy, but beauty, wholeness, immutability, and an infinitude of other attributes of God comprise man, who is Soul's expression.

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