Article October 21, 1967 Issue

Soul, Our Dwelling

CORNELIA JOYCE HALEY

A woman went out long after midnight one night to lure her horses back into the corral. They had escaped during the night after one of the children had left the gate ajar. As she looked about at the moonlight on the snow, so bright that it caused the trees to cast shadows, she thought of the concern her friends had expressed over her living alone in the woods in an isolated house. Yet she felt so conscious of dwelling in God's spiritual universe that she had no fear.

Suddenly she realized what she had learned in Christian Science: that this same truth applied to the belief that one lived in the body. The body did not house her real selfhood. As a spiritual idea, she never existed in a mortal body at all. She could laugh at the suggestions regarding her body which mortal mind claimed. There was no more need to be afraid of the sensations of the body than of her friend's fears about her living in a house in the woods. If sickness were a problem, she could destroy it in her consciousness and therefore in her body.

Surely when David spoke of dwelling "in the secret place of the most High,"^{Ps. 91:1;} he thought of a spiritual dwelling without corporeality. When Christ Jesus talked to his disciples, he told them, "In my Father's house are many mansions."^{John 14:2;} Certainly Jesus, who continuously turned his disciples' thought to the spiritual, wished to awaken the disciples to see themselves dwelling as ideas in Soul, in his Father's house. His own true concept of the body as temple, or expression of Truth, enabled him to raise himself from the dead. Nor did he claim that any of his works were peculiar to himself, but rather that all men in all ages could follow his example.