Article October 14, 1967 Issue

God's Kingdom, the Truth We Know

HARRY R. CHAMBERLAIN

"The kingdom of God is within you."^{Luke 17:21;} Jesus made this statement to indicate the spiritual relationship of man to God. The kingdom of God reveals the real man and comprises the harmony of his being. The kingdom of God can only be that which God is knowing and expressing, and the divine expression in His creation and in His man. Nothing is external to infinite Mind's allness and goodness. We must understand that God's manifestation of Himself comprises our true being or substance. This statement must be true, else God is not All.

Mrs. Eddy opens "the scientific statement of being" in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health, thus: "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter."^{Science and Health, p. 468;} Then she gives us that statement of truth which completely denies mortal mind and its material dream: "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all." If, while declaring that "all is infinite Mind," we are mentally consenting to having a selfhood in matter, if in some manner we seem to be existing outside Mind's allness as a separate entity, we are denying the first sentence of the "scientific statement of being." This would be the equivalent of trying to accept both the first and second chapters of Genesis, the one recording a spiritual creation and the other a material creation, as compatible. One denies the other. Both cannot be true.

Can the kingdom of God be other than the truth that Jesus said we should know in order to become free? Could not Jesus have meant that we would be free of the mesmerism described in the second chapter of Genesis, the dream narrative of mortal consciousness, the false Adam ego? We need not consent to Adam's dream. Mrs. Eddy says, "Spiritual insight of Truth and Love antidotes and destroys the errors of flesh, and brings to light the true reflection: man as God's image, or 'the first man,' for Christ plainly declared, through Jesus, 'Before Abraham was, I am.'"^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 189.}

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