Article October 11, 1952 Issue

OBJECTS OF SENSE OR IDEAS OF SOUL?

MEREDITH RUSSELL

Healing in Christian Science replaces misconceptions of God and man with the truth of being. All discordant conditions are erroneous beliefs. No matter what the type or quality of the discord, its contrariety to God's idea denominates it a falsity, no part of God's creation.

"Does this mean," it might be asked, "that one in whom the symptoms of disease appear, is not sick? Does it mean that one on whom disaster seems to have fallen is actually prosperous, well, carefree, and happy? Do not these discordant conditions constitute a large portion of human experience?"

The student of Christian Science knows that these conditions are not the reality of being. They are illusions, having only a seeming existence in the false picture of man as material, separated from God and experiencing something which the sole creator and governor of the universe did not create and could not tolerate. But simply to affirm that a suffering individual is not sick, but well; not poor, but prosperous; not unhappy, but joyous, is not metaphysical practice. "Metaphysics," Mary Baker Eddy states in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 269), "resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul." The ideas of Soul dwell in Mind, God, and they represent the truth of being, of man created and maintained by Mind, Spirit, as God's expression, dwelling forever perfect in the kingdom of heaven. The objects of sense are the objectifications of unillumined human thinking, which draws its conclusions from the testimony of the material senses, accepts matter as basic, and ascribes reality to discordant conditions.

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