IDOLS OF CIVILIZATION

The divinely inspired revelator of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, writes in her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 173), "The idols of civilization are far more fatal to health and longevity than are the idols of barbarism." One of our present-day forms of idolatry is the perhaps unconscious worship of the human body. Believing that they live in matter instead of in Mind, mortals devote themselves and their thinking to a material body, giving it a good time, making it materially comfortable, feeding, clothing, and petting it, and seeing that it has a maximum of pleasure. They are especially concerned, of course, with keeping this body healthy.

Aware of this, Mrs. Eddy asks with reason (ibid., p. 174), "Is civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air?" One may also recall the words of Christ Jesus when he said (Matt. 6:25): "I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?"

The teaching of Christian Science, revealing as it does man's incorporeal being as the expression of Spirit, establishes the understanding that health and well-being are the permanent heritage of man. It declares that man is well right now, because God and His entire creation exist eternally in perfection. Christian Science points out that to believe in the reality and power of disease is, in effect, breaking the First Commandment, because it is an acknowledgment of and a belief in the power and reality of evil and matter.

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NO RESISTANCE TO GOD
November 11, 1950
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