Editorial September 12, 1970 Issue

The Solution to Poverty

Carl J. Welz

If we define poverty as a sense of limitation, it is possible that the wealthy people of this world are as poor as those we usually think of as underprivileged. In an article in McCall's magazine Harvey Cox says: "There is nothing wrong with prosperity if we genuinely want other people to have it, too. The trouble is we still don't believe the rest of the world could attain prosperity except at the cost of our own standard of living. We have a mentality of scarcity. So we hoard our riches and glare suspiciously at those we think would like to lighten their own load of poverty." ^{McCall's, January, 1968, p. 119;}

The disciples of Christ Jesus had "a mentality of scarcity" when they were faced with a problem of feeding five thousand people but among them had but five loaves and two fishes. To divide what they had would have meant, practically, no food for anyone. But Jesus' mentality was at one with the divine Mind, God. He had no intention of dividing the food but of multiplying it. "And they did all eat, and were filled: and they took up of the fragments that remained twelve baskets full." ^{Matt. 14:20;}

To Jesus, substance was spiritual, not material. Mind was substance, and the idea or substance of food was not in the material loaves and fishes but in the divine Mind. To have substance in any form was to have what was always being multiplied mentally as ideas are multiplied, not by machinations of the human intellect but by the divine understanding, which Jesus recognized and accepted as the only real consciousness of man. This understanding was, and is, an attribute of Mind, or divine Love. Mind's process of mental multiplication is its manifested understanding of divine Love. Withholding is never part of the divine understanding; so for us to withhold the good we have is to contradict the nature of Mind. To hoard our substance is to limit it, and thereby to misunderstand—to have it only in belief, but not really to have it at all.

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