The many useful discoveries of recent years, such as radio, television, electronics, and plastics, have brought to light physical forces hitherto unknown, or little understood. These discoveries do not represent the evolving of new forces, but the discovery of already existing ones. But human thinking, breaking through its self-imposed limitations, now discerns and uses what was previously hidden by the darkness of ignorance.

Physical scientists, for instance, have recently found that bats, in flight, are able to avoid objects in the dark because they use a certain type of radar. They send out sounds, unheard by the human ear, which echo back when they encounter an object. The bat, thus warned, avoids it. Men have only just now found the forces of radar. The bats have been using them for no one knows how long—perhaps since bats came to be bats.

But there are forces, far more important than those of radar and electronics, which have always been, and which are now, vitally related to the life and happiness of you and me, and all mankind. Whereas electrical and physical forces are wholly unintelligent, these forces are inherently intelligent. They are the forces of divine Mind. Mind is their substance. Mind is their power. They are the forces we strive to honor and cherish in our thought, the forces we teach our children to recognize, respect, and obey. They are the moral forces that make us love what is good and loathe what is evil; the forces that make us wise, merciful, just, loving, and meek. They are the only real, positive, and enduring forces—the forces of God.

These intelligent, constructive, spiritual forces are indispensable to civilization. On them society rests. Without them it would collapse. But their value and potency have been recognized only in a small measure. The revelation of Christian Science is the discovery of their universal availability and unlimited potency. They are Mind's means for meeting every human problem, bringing health and wholeness to every person, and unifying all men in the oneness of Truth, under the sovereignty of God's omniactive law.

Christ Jesus understood so well the superiority of spiritual over material force. Every case he healed—the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the leprous, the crippled, the sinful—was a proving that Mind endows man with unlimited power to resist and overcome ignorant, disabling, material forces, outlaw them through spiritual understanding, and bring to light the natural control of spiritual, divine Mind-force, which enforces normal, healthful being here and now in our human experience.

These ageless, timeless, eternal forces of Love, Life, God, are present where you are and where I am. They bespeak the activity of omnipotent, omnipresent Mind, whose potency is ever working to constitute, maintain, and perpetuate its expression, man. Says Mary Baker Eddy (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 331), "Midst the falling leaves of old-time faiths, above the frozen crust of creed and dogma, the divine Mind-force, filling all space and having all power, upheaves the earth."

Ponder the thought that the divine Mind-force is filling all space, clothed with all power. Where material sense says the forces of affliction are afflicting, the true idea of God reveals that right there the divine Mind-force is, and is omnipotently active, producing and preserving the man who manifests God.

A woman who was a student of Christian Science was afflicted with goiter. At the husband's insistence she consulted a physician, who advised an immediate operation. Her husband, however, consented to her having Christian Science treatment for two weeks before he would insist on her submitting to an operation. A practitioner was employed who discovered that the trouble was rooted in the patient's unhappy mental state over interference with her normal freedom, with resulting domestic discord. The physical condition was produced by what were thought to be physical forces. Actually they were negative mental forces of friction and unhappiness.

The practitioner helped the patient to utilize the intelligent spiritual forces of Mind, expressed in right ideas of God of herself, and of her husband, to nullify the negative suggestions of material thought. The spiritual fact was recognized that God associates all His children according to the law of divine order-, which is absolute, continuous, all-governing. In this order the right activity of one idea cannot detract from the joy, freedom, and happiness of any other idea. All live and move in Him as His, and God cannot interfere with Himself. The forces of spiritual understanding reversed and rendered void the ignorant afflictive forces, and the fear attending them, and the abnormal physical condition was quickly healed. Spiritual forces had won the victory for health and harmony. They had proved the unsubstantially of so-called material forces.

The forces of affliction argued to the impotent man at the pool of Bethesda that he was bound to the earth. Jesus, conscious of the presence of the omnipotence of spiritual force in man, said, "Rise . . . and walk." Belief in negative material forces produced a great storm on the lake, but Jesus, conscious of the ever-presence and supremacy of the intelligent forces of Love, said with divine authority, "Peace, be still." Material forces said they had forced Lazarus to die and be entombed, but Jesus contradicted the assertion by the command, "Lazarus, come forth."

Let us then recognize our inalienable ability to feel, understand, and use these same eternal, spiritual, health-producing, happiness-bestowing forces of God, whose function is to make the health and harmony of man as stable and continuous as His own being, which man eternally reflects.

Paul Stark Seeley