Editorial January 27, 1962 Issue

The Gospel of the Kingdom

Helen Wood Bauman

Probably nothing is more important to the progress of humanity out of its still primitive limitations than the understanding that consciousness is fundamental to experience. This is true, whether one is considering spiritual consciousness, divine Mind's reflection, or its supposed opposite, material consciousness. Whether experience is subjective —in the mind—or is an external phenomenon is something humanity must decide; for true dominion depends upon a correct standpoint. The world may well be at a crossroads where a decision must be made.

Dialectical materialism declares for the external standpoint; scientific Christianity declares for the subjective. Christ Jesus taught (Luke 17:21), "The kingdom of God is within you." The Christian Scientist follows this metaphysical precept, and he looks within his true, spiritual consciousness to find the perfect concepts of divine Love's creating. Mary Baker Eddy says in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 475): "Man is idea, the image, of Love; he is not physique. He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas." And in the same paragraph we read that man is "that which has no separate mind from God."

In the textbook we also find that one of the great points which became clear to Mrs. Eddy in relation to her discovery of Christian Science is that matter is a subjective state of the carnal, or mortal, mind, having no identity apart from the senses which observe it. Of equal importance was the discovery that the carnal mind is a myth and that it can be proved to be nothing.

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