Editorial September 24, 1966 Issue

What Christian Science Does

Helen Wood Bauman

Christian Science does far more than heal the sick. Its chief mission is to continue Jesus' work of revealing the kingdom of heaven, the realm of Spirit, which human beings glimpse wistfully. Being healed of sickness is a gratifying experience and a comforting one. But such healing takes us only to the threshold of heaven. The full revelation of God's kingdom awaits our spiritual maturing. Not death, but the discernment of real life, makes this revelation possible; and this takes diligent study and consecrated application of the truth, of divine reality.

Heaven is the mental state in which God governs one's entire character and experience. Even glimpsing heaven makes one conscious of the power of God taking over the control of one's present sense of life and guiding one in right directions. Then one realizes that he is not living to himself, struggling to work out problems of health and supply and employment and human relations through personally possessed intelligence. Instead he finds that God is the source of intelligence and that this essential quality is demonstrable right in his own consciousness. He learns that man is inseparable from God or divine Mind and that God expresses Himself through man. In other words, man has a divine source.

Many human problems come from the ignorant belief that man can exist apart from God. And this evil belief may even lead people to the awful conclusion that there is no God, that God is nonexistent or at least withdrawn at present from the human scene. Christian Science clarifies the meaning of the words of Christ Jesus, "I and my Father are one."^{John 10: 30;} Not that they were the same, but that they were inseparable as cause and effect. And this inseparability of God and man is true of every one of us in his true selfhood, which is God's image and likeness.