Editorial July 8, 1950 Issue

"THE HIGHER MISSION"

Helen Wood Bauman

The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, often referred to her discovery as a system or method of healing, and she considered the healing of disease and disorder as proof that Science was understood. She loved to utilize her knowledge of spiritual reality to destroy suffering of every kind, for she was filled with compassion and longed to release all men from the illusive thrall of the carnal mind. But Mrs. Eddy saw her mission as of deeper import than merely to give relief to suffering mortals. On page 150 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" she says that the mission of the eternal Science she discovered, like the Master's, is not primarily to heal sickness. "Now, as then," she declares, "signs and wonders are wrought in the metaphysical healing of physical disease; but these signs are only to demonstrate its divine origin,—to attest the reality of the higher mission of the Christ-power to take away the sins of the world."

Christian Science destroys disease only as it destroys the sinful sense of existence in which suffering seems to inhere. Its healing efforts are directed toward eliminating the belief that there is another life and mind besides God. Before the pure desire to know God and obey Him the obscuring veil of material sensations parts, and we gain views of man in God's image, as he has always existed in Science, both sinless and diseaseless. The effect of these clearer view's is to heal ourselves and others, but the deeper value of the experience lies in the fact that the mortal sense of life has been, in some measure, proved to be unreal.

According to Christian Science, God is one infinite, good Mind and there is no other; and man, Mind's idea, dwells in the atmosphere of Spirit, where he is eternally secure and perfect. False theology hides these truths and thus gives support to the supposition of an evil mind and the belief that man can be sick and sinful. It fails to teach men to identify themselves as in reality God's ideas; hence its ineffectiveness in healing the world's burden of disease and crime, disaster and war, and the bitter finality of death.

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