Editorial May 20, 1967 Issue

Breaking the Fixed Illusion of Matter

Helen Wood Bauman

Never has matter come under such penetrating and intelligent scrutiny as it has in our time. Natural scientists have found that matter is interconvertible with energy and that tremendous amounts of energy can be released from it either to benefit or to harm mankind. This is a materialistic approach to the evaluation of matter.

Christian Science approaches the evaluation of matter from a religious or theological point of view. It defines matter as a godless illusion in the carnal, or mortal, mind—not as a substance external to that false mind, but as a substratum of it. The Christian Scientist sees matter as made up of evil forces which are destroyed by God, Spirit, and His attributes. Christian Science insists that matter will ultimately disappear as God's creation of spiritual ideas and energies is understood. This disappearance is inevitable because Spirit is infinite and matter is finite; the two cannot actually exist together. The more clearly we discern the presence of Spirit, the less we are impressed by matter and the ills which derive from belief in it—sin, sickness, poverty, death.

Every healing that has been brought about by Christian Science has proved in some measure that matter is illusion, a mental state, a godless counterfeit of reality, which must yield to spiritual truth. Christ Jesus was constantly showing the effect of bringing Spirit, God, to bear upon material illusions, a fact which deserves the most thorough scientific research. When Jesus said to his disciples, "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life," ^{ John 6:63;} he was teaching the lesson that life is not in matter and, by implication, that matter is nothing.