Editorial August 11, 1980 Issue

The Christ is there

BEULAH M. ROEGGE

More than evangelizing, more than preaching, is the value of the Christian's steadfast recognition of the everywhere presence of the Christ. Even where traditional teaching, or lack of true spiritual instruction, leads people to deny the truth of being, still God and His Christ are there. In reality man has—does not have to get—spiritual understanding. It's this Christly vision that enables us to apprehend Deity correctly.

Too often the tendency of traditional teaching is to limit spiritual understanding, even to deny its own inspired roots, and to perpetuate misinformation about God. The Christ seems lost in rigid beliefs ruthlessly held to. But paganism cannot forever infiltrate the minds of men and women; the activity of the Christ, inherent in true being, demands in its progressive unfoldment that concepts of a merciless, changeable God yield to the revelation of God's character as both just and merciful and always powerfully available to free mankind from tradition-barricaded mental prisons. "God's being is infinity, freedom, harmony, and boundless bliss,"^{ Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 481;} states the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy.

This inspired Leader of the Christian Science movement might have been writing to concerned world citizens today when she noted: "We turn, with sickened sense, from a pagan Jew's or Moslem's misconception of Deity, for peace; and find rest in the spiritual ideal, or Christ. For 'who is so great a God as our God!' unchangeable, all-wise, all-just, all-merciful; the ever-loving, ever-living Life, Truth, Love: comforting such as mourn, opening the prison doors to the captive, marking the unwinged bird, pitying with more than a father's pity; healing the sick, cleansing the leper, raising the dead, saving sinners."^{ Miscellaneous Writings, p. 124;}