Article April 1, 1950 Issue

"THOUGHT EXPANDS INTO EXPRESSION"

CLAIRE CHANCELLOR

When Mary Baker Eddy discovered the Science of being, that same truth taught by Christ Jesus on the shores of Galilee and among the hills and valleys of Judea, she found the substance of true thought to be God, divine Mind. By this revelation she proved that being is spiritually mental, and that the Principle of being is wholly good, perfect God. She discerned that because the function of Mind is to know, there is no such thing as unexpressed thought. Divine Principle, or Mind, would be a nonentity without its expression, and the expression of this Principle, or Mind, she found to be man, the complete image and likeness of itself—perfect, whole, entirely good, lovely, loving, and beloved.

As these momentous truths were revealed to the inspired thought of our Leader, she saw the necessity of accounting for the seeming opposites of perfection, such as sin, disease, sorrow, and death. The fact that Mind, God, is in itself All-in-all and can have no opposite shows that its seeming opposite must be only illusion, a dream without foundation in fact. As the impossibility of any other substance than God became clear to her, the absolute unreality, the nothingness, of matter became obvious. Discord of every name and nature was logically proved to be merely illusion, having place only in suppositional human consciousness—that battleground of good and evil thinking where good is proved to be divinely derived and evil to be powerless, nonexistent.

Knowing the importance, then, of unraveling the seeming tangle in which mortal mind would involve mankind, our wise Leader likens the binding materialism of mortals to "mental swaddling-clothes." On page 255 of the textbook of Christian Science, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," she writes, "As mortals drop off their mental swaddling-clothes, thought expands into expression." As human consciousness is freed from false beliefs and restrictions of wrong thinking, it reaches a higher and more expansive thought. What one thinks is expressed, be it divine or human. Godlike or personal. Mrs. Eddy queries (ibid., p. 462), "Are thoughts divine or human?" And she adds, "That is the important question." If one's thoughts are divine, the harmony of his home, his business, his environment, is assured; if human, doubt, fear, inharmony, and confusion are apt to be manifested.

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