Editorial September 16, 1950 Issue

SPIRIT, NOT MATTER

Robert Ellis Key

Whatever we cognize with the material senses is temporal and unreal. Mary Baker Eddy writes in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 71), "Close your eyes, and you may dream that you see a flower, that you touch and smell it." And she continues: "Close your eyes again, and you may see landscapes, men, and women. Thus you learn that these also are images, which mortal mind holds and evolves and which simulate mind, life, and intelligence."

Material sense presents its phenomena as temporal. Its impressions are fleeting, often fabulous. We may find it difficult to reconstruct scenes from the past. Occasionally a vivid sense impression of pleasure or pain may stamp itself with sharp incision upon the tablets of memory, but this is the exception rather than the rule. The actual scenes through which in belief we have moved materially are outlined only in imagery, and they soon disappear.

The reason for this is that the material senses report only material events, events which are seen in terms of matter rather than Spirit, and such events are in the realm of dreams. Reality far transcends them. When with the spiritual senses we discern the creations of God, the view does not fade, nor do loved ones vanish.

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