Editorial June 25, 1955 Issue

ONE GOD

Helen Wood Bauman

The truth that there is but one God reaches mankind more slowly than is generally admitted. Even those who profess this truth often have little understanding of what it implies. They go on believing in many minds, many creators, giving little heed to the fact that God, being Mind, must be the only Mind, and that Mind alone can create anything. The serpent's first whisperings in the allegory of the genesis of mortal man included the suggestion (Gen. 3:5), "Ye shall be as gods." But the First Commandment (Ex. 20:3), "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," refutes the belief that mortals are creators, makers of false laws and their effects—material concepts of all kinds.

We are apt to think that having "other gods" implies the idolatry of material possessions or perhaps of persons or of traditions. Let us note the comment made by Mary Baker Eddy after she quotes the First Commandment at one point in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." She says (p. 280), "But behold the zeal of belief to establish the opposite error of many minds." There the marginal heading reads, "Belief in many gods." According to Christian Science, man is not a mind, but an idea of the one divine Mind. He is not a god, but a creation of the one God. He is not a maker either of good or of evil, but is himself made by the one Maker. Science reveals man as the reflection of God, His spiritual image, and reflection designates something derived rather than an original or an originator.

The belief of many minds, many gods, leads to all types of evil. Mrs. Eddy's discovery that what seems to be a material creation is but the subjective condition of so-called mortal mind, a dream of false consciousness, explains the belief of many gods. What mankind conceive as body, as material law, as a physical universe, is not something apart from mortal thought, but is so-called mortal mind's misconception of identity, law, universe. Since the flesh is thought made manifest, we must admit that mortals are the makers of their own bodies. They likewise make the mental pictures which are imaged on their bodies. Mortals evolve their own laws: their beliefs operate as laws to produce their environment, their illnesses, and their other limitations. Mrs. Eddy tells us in "The People's Idea of God" (p. 11), "Mortals, alias mortal minds, make the laws that govern their bodies, as directly as men pass legislative acts and enact penal codes; while the body, obedient to the legislation of mind, but ignorant of the law of belief, calls its own enactments 'laws of matter."

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