Editorial October 7, 1950 Issue

SILENCING FALSE BELIEF

Helen Wood Bauman

According to her own analysis of her discovery of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy records that it was twofold. Not only did she discover that God is one infinite Mind and that His creation is a universe of divine ideas, but she discerned the true nature of matter as the fleeting conception of suppositional mortal mind. She discovered that we are living in a world of thought; that material objects are not external to the mind conscious of them, but are only its perceptions.

In her writings Mrs. Eddy describes matter variously, as a subjective state of mortal mind, as this so-called mind's grosser substratum, as a dream, as mesmeric illusion, or as a mind-picture. But perhaps her most frequent explanation is that matter is simply the belief of the carnal mind. She writes in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp. 86, 87): "Mortal mind sees what it believes as certainly as it believes what it sees. It feels, hears, and sees its own thoughts. Pictures are mentally formed before the artist can convey them to canvas. So is it with all material conceptions."

Because of her deep comprehension of God, Spirit, as All, Mrs. Eddy was close to the realm of divine Mind, and true concepts were tangible to her penetrating spiritual perception. This made it possible for her to detect the illusive quality of material concepts, to recognize them as mere delusions of a mind that was itself a belief, and to control their conditions with truth. By destroying the belief in the existence of sin and sickness she caused these false conditions to disappear. Discussing her method of healing, which establishes God as All, she says (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 63), "We attack the sinner's belief in the pleasure of sin, alias the reality of sin, which makes him a sinner, in order to destroy this belief and save him from sin; and we attack the belief of the sick in the reality of sickness, in order to heal them."

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