Editorial August 18, 1951 Issue

SHALL WE PLAN?

Helen Wood Bauman

A good plan represents a demonstration of intelligence. It is specific proof that man is inseparable from God's wisdom and efficiency. Through Christian Science we learn that good planning results from the understanding that God, divine Mind, is one infinite intelligence and that man is the idea through which intelligence is unfailingly expressed; that man exists in a spiritual universe, where each idea is acting at the absolute apex of its spiritual usefulness and capability. In His great universal plan of heaven, His outline of order, God, impartial Love, bestows the ability to express wisdom, resourcefulness, and intelligence equally upon all His children.

John refutes the belief that man is a mortal when he declares in the first chapter of his Gospel that those who receive the Christ have power to prove themselves the sons of God; and he describes those sons as being born "not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." Our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, uses this passage as a text in a Bible Lesson recorded in "Miscellaneous Writings" (pp. 180–185), and she says (p. 182), "The apostle indicates no personal plan of a personal Jehovah, partial and finite; but the possibility of all finding their place in God's great love, the eternal heritage of the Elohim, His sons and daughters."

Here one sees that good planning in human affairs does not imply that God knows human problems or that He communicates definite personal directions to mortals. It does show that someone has awakened sufficiently from the dream of being a mortal in need of a human plan to prove his true activity in Mind's economy as its individual expression of intelligence and good judgment. It shows that human will has been subordinated to the divine and that God's will has been demonstrated as the controlling force "in earth, as it is in heaven."

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