Editorial December 18, 1954 Issue

"A LEADING POINT"

Helen Wood Bauman

Christian Science strikes at the roots of all limitation through its revelation that God, the Principle of man and all the universe, is not in His creation but is reflected by it. Mary Baker Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 467): "The greater cannot be in the lesser. The belief that the greater can be in the lesser is an error that works ill. This is a leading point in the Science of Soul, that Principle is not in its idea." Perhaps Christ Jesus was declaring the same foundational truth when he said (John 10:29), "My Father ... is greater than all."

The pantheistic belief that mind is in matter would ultimate in many minds, many gods; and this is the error with which Christian Science deals primarily. If Mind, God, could be divided into many minds, each exercising its own will and expressing its own limited conceptions, nothing but discord could result. Envy and rivalry, selfish competition, malice, murder—these would be the inevitable sequence. And is not this sequence what the mortal sense of existence claims to produce? Is not this the cause of all mortal inharmony from the quarreling of sparrows to the grim devastation of war?

The purpose of Christ Jesus' example was to reveal the Principle of being as Love, the one Father of all, and man as Love's object, its idea and inseparable expression. It was Jesus' understanding of the Father as the source of life and intelligence, of law and power and immortality, that gave him dominion over limitations imposed by the belief that life and intelligence are in matter. He used his knowledge of the true order of being in practical ways. He restored sight to the blind on the basis that discernment is an indestructible Mind-faculty, never in matter or conditioned by it; and in the same way he gave hearing to the deaf. It was because he knew man as God's expression that he could restore freedom of action to the palsied, sanity to the demented, and even life to the dead. His deeds proved the advantage of understanding that the greater is never in the lesser.

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