Editorial January 23, 1971 Issue

Finding One's Place

Carl J. Welz

Christian Science is sometimes falsely represented as a means for getting God's help in accomplishing one's own will. This false representation appears frequently in the area of place-finding. Someone wants to find the material place or circumstance that is most profitable for himself but does not want to accept fully Paul's words, "For in him [God] we live, and move, and have our being" Acts 17:28; The individual thinks he finds a happy compromise in the belief that God directs him to his "right place," but the place he has in mind is not man's spiritual dwelling place but a place in material life that God does not know. So the belief is self-deceptive. Then when the place or circumstance one believes God has led him into turns out to be something short of perfection, he is confused.

Christian Science does enable us to work out our place in human life. But it does so on a spiritually scientific basis. This basis is the truth of God and man: God, the divine Mind, and man, Mind's spiritual idea. "The scientific statement of being" in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, begins, "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all." Science and Health, p. 468;

The infinite Mind can know only that which is within and of itself. What we experience humanly seems to include much that the infinite Mind does not know—much matter. But Christian Science shows us that an understanding of matter as but mental illusion, and of life, truth, intelligence, and substance as entirely in Mind, awakens us to that in our human experience which God does know—Mind's own qualities. And as we recognize these qualities as our own (we are Mind's ideas) we can use them to examine the roads ahead and tell which ones are good roads and which are not.

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Editorial
Help Bring Peace
January 23, 1971
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