Editorial September 15, 1956 Issue

MAN'S PERFECT EXISTENCE

Helen Wood Bauman

The world takes for granted the belief that one's life exists in the flesh and is conditioned by matter; that the government of one's life depends upon material law, heredity, education, chance. With remarkable boldness Christian Science challenges this entrenched traditional estimate of life. Mary Baker Eddy says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 6): "Mind governs all. That we exist in God, perfect, there is no doubt, for the conceptions of Life, Truth, and Love must be perfect; and with that basic truth we conquer sickness, sin, and death."

Here Mrs. Eddy not only states a revolutionary truth, but she tells us of the power to heal, which is inherent in this truth. Sin, sickness, and death are the effects of the mistaken belief that we live in a world of matter and "dwell in houses of clay" (Job 4:19). When we realize that matter and flesh are transitory illusions produced by false belief and that no one lives in a frail, fleshly body but in indestructible Spirit, God, we begin to feel the freedom of real life. We are at once healthier, our mental horizons expand, we are less bound by matter.

According to Christian Science, there is but one Life—God. And man dwells in Life as its reflection, never absorbing Life, but ever its perfect expression. Then man cannot die, nor can he be born, for Life, which gives him being, neither ends nor begins, but exists eternally. Christ Jesus was affirming his perfect and immortal existence in God when he said (John 17:5), "Now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was." The Master's life among men was a constant example of the effect which follows the understanding of his teaching that the fleshly sense of life "profiteth nothing" (John 6:63). One needs to realize that the glory of spiritual perfection is the normal state of man.

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