Editorial December 8, 1956 Issue

THE TEST OF INTELLIGENCE

Helen Wood Bauman

Mankind's greatest need is for intelligence. According to human appearances, intelligence is a personally possessed characteristic which depends upon heredity, education, and environment. Some individuals seem woefully lacking in this desirable quality, others are what we call brilliant. There are also persons who neither rise to great heights of skill nor sink to abject ignorance. Qualities by which one's degree of intelligence is generally estimated are ability, capacity, retentiveness, judgment. Intelligence cancels ignorance and impels inquiry; it makes one useful in society and promotes success.

But Christian Science provides a test which a merely human sense of intelligence cannot pass. Mary Baker Eddy says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 23), "The prophets, Jesus, and the apostles, demonstrated a divine intelligence that subordinates so-called material laws; and disease, death, winds, and waves, obey this intelligence." The test of intelligence is power. More than human alertness is involved in the intelligence which demonstrates divine might. Only from God can this desirable constituent be gained, and Christian Science explains how all may bring intelligence to light as an element of real manhood.

According to this Science, intelligence is the primal quality of God. Through man, God's likeness, intelligence is shown forth, or individualized, and each of us must demonstrate some measure of his real selfhood in order to express the true intelligence that subordinates laws of matter. But there are no degrees of intelligence. In its quality and scope intelligence is infinite. It includes the elements of love and integrity, purity and justice, and it can never be divorced from them. In fact, no action is truly intelligent which is not motivated by these components.

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