Editorial January 24, 1953 Issue

"THE LESSON OF TO-DAY"

Helen Wood Bauman

So important did our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, consider the impersonalization of the mortal sense of life that she said in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 310), "To impersonalize scientifically the material sense of existence—rather than cling to personality—is the lesson of to-day." To mankind the material sense of existence, or mortal consciousness, appears as their own corporeal senses. But until the discovery of Christian Science, it was not understood that these senses are impersonal, without actual identity; that they are a supposed addition to man, whose senses are purely spiritual and God-derived.

Christian Science is making this fact clear, and many are beginning to realize that the material objects they seem to see represent nothing more than the false conceptions of the finite senses, which are incapable of perceiving the infinite conceptions of Deity. This is proved when one understandingly declares that his real identity expresses the perceptive faculties of Soul; that these faculties see creation as God makes it; and that the physical senses have no Principle, no reality, no ability to interpret creation correctly. As one mentally insists upon this distinction he attains an improved state of thought, health is established, limitation lessened, and sin silenced. He has withdrawn in a measure from the mortal sense of life by robbing it of identity; he has proved his ability "to impersonalize scientifically the material sense of existence." He has stopped clinging to personality, stopped looking to the seeming mortal self for information regarding creation.

If we either fear or cherish the flesh and believe it to be the basis of life, this is because we are not yet fully convinced that God is the one source of existence and that flesh is only the material senses' mode of defining man, an unspiritual way of thinking, a personal interpretation of substance. If we either fear or hate one another, this is because we do not impersonalize mortal existence, do not see that there is but one evil—"the material sense of existence"—and that it is without entity or identity. We do not see that every mortal concept is error's lie, not separate from the sense beholding it, but a conception of that falsifying sense. Mrs. Eddy says in "Unity of Good" (p. 8), "What you see, hear, feel, is a mode of consciousness, and can have no other reality than the sense you entertain of it."

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