Article September 8, 1951 Issue

SALVATION, AN INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE

ROBERT J. MITCHELL

Students of Christian Science throughout the world recognize and acknowledge the unassailable and unique position of Mary Baker Eddy in the Christian Science movement as Discoverer, Founder, and Leader, and they recognize the fact that the full and final revelation of Truth has come through her; but they do not always recognize the necessity of putting Truth into practice. Each one of us must accept the Christ, Truth, for himself. Each must establish Truth in his consciousness as the foundation of existence, must allow Truth to lead him along the path, the ultimate goal of which is the full realization that God, Love, is All.

The truth of being, or Christian Science, may be presented to an individual through any one of a number of channels, and it may be received by that individual in a variety of ways. It may be looked upon as fantasy. This condition of human thought could well be what Jesus had in mind when, in telling the parable of the seed that fell on different types of soil, he said (Luke 8:12), "Those by the way side are they that hear; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved." Is it not a belief in sin, sickness, and death, or the belief that matter is substance, that is the devil spoken of above and that suggests that the truths of Christian Science are not wanted?

Another type of thought may receive Christian Science as a beautiful philosophy so transcendental as to have little value in human life. Does not this thinking belong to those who receive the word on rocky soil, who, "when they hear, receive the word with joy; and these have no root, which for a while believe, and in time of temptation fall away"? This may typify the scholastic approach, in which the human intellect tries to perceive and grasp spiritual facts. This attempt is doomed to failure, for the divine facts can be appreciated only by spiritual sense. The human intellect, based as it is on the illusion of mind in matter, can never perceive reality any more than the dream sense can perceive the existence of the mentality that is awake. A strictly intellectual or scholastic approach to Christian Science will never bring into our experience the grand verities of being, for in order to demonstrate them we must see them as spiritual facts, a feat impossible to material sense. Jesus realized this when he said (John 6: 63), "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing."

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