THE NATURE OF DEITY

J. V. DITTEMORE

THE Christian Scientist cannot accept the time-honored belief that God is a corporeal personality. His religious experience has convinced him that only as he realizes the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence of Deity—qualities which cannot be personalized or confined within a finite form—is he able to bring into his daily life, in some measure, those definite and satisfying experiences or "signs" which the Master promised should be the heritage of those disciples of all ages who believed in, or understood, the Principle of his teachings.

Throughout all time mortals have been idolaters. It has made little difference whether they have worshiped images of iron and stone, or images conceived by the human mind and held in thought as enlarged concepts of mortal and finite personality. The results in either case have been to materialize worship and to disinherit mankind through failure to worship the Father "in spirit and in truth." When we pray to an anthropomorphic God, our concept of Him confirms the belief that His judgment will be based on and influenced by a human sense of justice and of penalty, instead of by divine, unvarying law, and we expect our relief to come through pardon instead of through increased spiritual understanding.

Not through petition and pardon, but through knowing the truth, as declared by the great Nazarene, are mortals to be made free from the sin, disease, and woe of human experience. This "knowing the truth" is the prayer of Christian Science, and it comprises the answer as well as the prayer. On pages 3 and 11 of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy has written: "Who would stand before a blackboard, and pray the principle of mathematics to solve the problem? The rule is already established, and it is our task to work out the solution. . . . His [God's] work is done, and we have only to avail ourselves of God's rule in order to receive His blessing, which enables us to work out our own salvation." "Petitions bring to mortals only the results of mortals' own faith."

The Master declared that "God is a Spirit." Christian Science reaffirms this definition and accepts an additional synonym, declaring Him to be infinite, divine Mind, the supreme creative and governing Principle of the universe. From this premise it must follow that real existence is spiritual and permanent, while our present material sense of existence, with all the evil and suffering it includes, is of that heaven and earth which shall pass away. God is infinite Truth and intelligence; therefore the normal man, governed wholly by his creator, can express only that which is true.

Human experience, with its changing theories and self-imposed penalties, defrauds the race through the belief that a manlike God, located in a place called heaven, is sending disease and suffering on His helpless children for some inscrutable but wise purpose. Christian Science utterly repudiates such a scheme. It declares that the kingdom of heaven is not afar off, but is wherever Truth abides, even within the consciousness of all who abide "under the shadow of the Almighty." The "spiritual intuitions" of prophet and apostle were indeed the words of God, the "angels" which Christian Science shows us are entertained unawares by all who rise above the strife and contention of creed and dogma into the peace, joy, and righteousness which come through having but one God, good, and loving our neighbor as ourself.

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CHRISTIAN SCIENCE IN EMERGENCIES

June 26, 1909

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