Article June 23, 2014 Issue

Christian Science, not corporeal sense

Blythe Evans

There is a children’s story about a little boy and a little girl playing in a summer house that has panes of various colored glass (Virginia Haynes, “The House with the Colored Windows,” Sentinel, January 1, 1944; see also JSH-Online.com collections 1950s).

The little girl calls to her brother that she sees a red horse in the pasture. He replies, with a laugh, that the horse is green. Later they giggle together about a blue and a yellow horse. When they recount their fun to their mother, she wisely asks what they had to do to make the horse its original white again. After a puzzled pause, they tell her they didn’t have to make the horse white because there had never really been a red, green, blue, or yellow horse. He had always been white, but because they were looking through the colored windowpanes, he just appeared to be different colors. Their mother smiled; the children had learned a lesson in Christian Science about not being fooled by what the material senses report.

Whenever anything in our life looks or feels abnormal or distressing, we should ask ourselves if we are looking through the truthful windowpanes of Christian Science, the trusted “divine laws of Life, Truth, and Love” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 107) or if we are unwittingly viewing the situation through misleading and discolored corporeal sense, which “defrauds and lies” (p. 489). Some online definitions for corporeal are “fleshly, mortal, material.” And while Christian Science—the universal laws that help us understand our relationship to God, Spirit—gives us the accurate facts about our lives, corporeal sense distorts and misleads. We can be confident that the spiritual facts coming from Christian Science are reliable and victorious.