Article January 19, 1952 Issue

SPIRITUAL EMERGENCE

SYDNEY W. PORTNER

The necessity of relinquishing all belief in matter and material things as actual is paramount in the demonstration of Christian Science. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy we read (p. 552): "Mortals must emerge from this notion of material life as all-in-all. They must peck open their shells with Christian Science, and look outward and upward."

This Science states in unequivocal language that God, infinite Mind, or omnipresent Spirit, and His infinite manifestation, or expression, man and the real universe, are the only reality and that nothing exists outside of Him. It teaches that God, the sole creative Principle, conceives, maintains, and preserves His infinite universe, including man in His image and likeness. It further declares that God's creation reflects the substance of Spirit, partakes of its nature and attributes, and eternally exists as spiritual idea. From this premise it follows that matter and mortality, being contrary to and utterly at variance with Spirit, have no creator, no sphere of action or operation, no substance, no space for existence, no reality. Matter, then, is not an entity. It is an erroneous conception of material sense, an illusion of so-called mortal mind.

Because this teaching is utterly opposed to what most of the world considers basic, it appears to be revolutionary to the materialist. But a growing dissatisfaction with the hitherto blind acceptance of matter as entity is being evidenced in the progressive thinking of an increasing number of men and women all over the world, including that of many leading physicists and physical scientists. An example of this is the statement made by Dr. Edmund W. Sinnott, Dean of Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, and quoted by the editor of The Christian Science Monitor in an address at Northwestern University. Said Dr. Sinnott, "Matter in the old sense indeed has ceased to be."

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