Editorial May 27, 1961 Issue

Destroying the Basis of Fear

Helen Wood Bauman

In the allegory of Adam and Eve, an allegory which exposes the falsity of corporeal sense and the subtlety of its ways, God is depicted as questioning Adam, "Where art thou?" and Adam as answering, "I was afraid ... and I hid myself" (Gen. 3:9, 10). With masterful understanding Mary Baker Eddy interprets this great allegory in the light of the Science of being, the truth she discovered and named Christian Science. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" she makes this comment on Adam's confession (p. 532): "Fear was the first manifestation of the error of material sense."

More than human courage is needed in order to overcome the fear fundamental to the Adam-dream, or material sense, and Christian Science fills this need. It explains and proves the unreality of material sense, the consciousness of matter, in which every seeming fearsome concept or situation appears. And Science demonstrates the presence in each individual of spiritual sense, the ability to understand God and His indestructible, spiritual creation of ideas. Science makes this remarkable demonstration on the basis that spiritual consciousness is man's only real consciousness and that the consciousness of matter is extraneous to man; it is a supposed admixture which is not intrinsic to man, made in God's likeness.

Through the cultivation of spiritual consciousness, the student of Science loses his fear because he awakes to the realm of Spirit, in which there is no material concept and no destructive action to dread. Fear always denotes undestroyed materialism, and materialism is the simple or complex, the superficial or the deep-seated, belief in the reality of matter.

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