Editorial April 7, 1951 Issue

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND THE FARMER

Helen Wood Bauman

Christian Science helps the farmer. It brings his efforts under the control of divine law and instructs him how to break the bondage of uncertainty to which his crops and herds would ordinarily be subject. It points him to the Scriptures, which teach that those who are obedient to God inherit abundance and protection. We find there such assurances as these from Leviticus (26:3, 4, 6): "If ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase. ... And I will rid evil beasts out of the land."

The Scriptures are also authority for recognizing the divine Spirit as the true source of life and growth for plants. While the farmer realizes that enlightened methods of farming are necessary at the present stage of human progress and are practical evidence of the demonstration of the one infinite intelligence, he finds through Science that his metaphysical task is to understand that God is the Life of all and that divine Mind's mandate is for growth and abundance. The belief that life and growth are in the seed is pantheism, whereas Christian Science reveals Spirit to be the real substance of the seed and its quickening Principle.

Words often read thoughtlessly take on deep significance when Mary Baker Eddy explains them in the light of her great discovery. For instance, writing of the statement in the second chapter of Genesis that Deity made "the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew," she says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 520), "Here is the emphatic declaration that God creates all through Mind, not through matter,—that the plant grows, not because of seed or soil, but because growth is the eternal mandate of Mind."

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