Whoever trusts divine Spirit understandingly will be rewarded with proof that his trust is well placed. Whoever trusts matter will have to correct his mistake. From those two statements and their implications can be deduced the whole objective of the Christian Scientist. Only in God, divine Spirit, can man put his trust, for Spirit alone is substance. Matter, the so-called opposite of Spirit, is untrustworthy, because it is illusion. To the alignment of thought with these facts and to the keeping of it so aligned, the Christian Scientist's effort is dedicated.

God, divine Spirit, is responsible for the spiritual ideas He conceives. He not only creates them, but maintains them. Individualized as man, they know their divine source, its requirements of them, and its responsibility for their eternal and perfect existence. Each individual, then, in proving himself to be man, that is, proving himself to be constituted of God's spiritual ideas or qualities, is simultaneously aware of what to trust and what not to trust. Endowed with this awareness, such an individual inevitably places confidence in what can be depended upon, and in nothing else.

Humanly considered, the ability to place trust correctly is cultivated. It unfolds from the acceptance of the fact that God is the Father of man and from the progressive recognition of what that fact means in terms of the true nature of the individual. It is attested by exposure to consciousness not only of that which is untrustworthy, but also of the spurious nature of the so-called evidence which asserts that the untrustworthy is worthy.

Arrival at that happy perception has been described as "the great attainment"' by Mary Baker Eddy, Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. In her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 428), Mrs. Eddy puts it this way: "To divest thought of false trusts and material evidences in order that the spiritual facts of being may appear,—this is the great attainment by means of which we shall sweep away the false and give place to the true."

What, specifically, are some of these false trusts, and how is thought divested of them? Perhaps one of the most common of these is trust in matter for health. Why is this a false trust? Because matter is the dream of a dreaming mentality. It can neither give, maintain, nor restore health. Health or ill-health in matter is error. It is a phase of the false belief that a dream, an illusion, can be conscious.

True health is a quality of divine Mind—the quality of wholeness, which divine Mind knows to be its own. Man includes this quality, for man is made up of the qualities of Mind. He therefore depends upon divine Mind for his health, since divine Mind, the Mind of man, never loses one of its qualities, nor permits one of them to be impaired.

Such dependence is true trust. In the degree that an individual strengthens his conviction on this point he divests thought of false trust in any material, or opposite, quality of mortal mind deceptively seeming to be in his consciousness. By this procedure the material evidence of ill-health is discredited to the point of its disappearance, and confidence in divine Spirit, the author of spiritual ideas, is vindicated. What appears to human sense as matter is held at the point of no interference with the individual's consciousness of his wholeness.

Perhaps another false trust of which thought must be divested is dependence upon matter for sustenance and acceptance of material evidence that this is necessary. God sustains man with immortal, indestructible spiritual ideas. Each individual can trust these ideas to be always present in his consciousness, for no spiritual idea is ever absent from the divine Mind of man. These ideas, realized, are attended by the manifestation of their presence as sustenance.

Dependence upon money as matter, upon food as matter, upon employment as matter, upon wisdom as sharp practice, is false dependence. It engenders in supposition a mad scramble for that which immediately or ultimately proves to be a mirage. Being false sense, the manifestation is as false as the sense it manifests. But trust in divine Mind's understanding of the currency of its ideas, of the usefulness or employment of its qualities, of the self-containment of its intelligence, of the inexhaustible love by which obligations are met, is true trust. It is manifest in daily life in the spiritual consciousness of abundant sustenance, so that what appears to human sense as matter is held at the point of no interference with that consciousness.

That could be exactly what Christ Jesus meant when he said (Matt. 6:19-20), "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal." And it could also be what the Apostle Paul meant in his admonition to Timothy (I Tim. 6:17), "Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not high-minded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy."

In divesting thought of false trusts by discerning truly where trust belongs, one should place no small emphasis upon the corollary necessity for divesting thought of material evidences, as Mrs. Eddy phrases it in the quotation from the textbook previously used in this editorial. To material sense material evidences are, in supposition, vividly persuasive. But to spiritual sense they make no appeal. Therefore the divesting activity includes the demand that material sense be replaced in consciousness by the spiritual.

What one is convinced of, that he sees, feels, and is conscious of. If he entertains material or corporeal sense, he will discover that material sense is convinced in his name of the reality of every undesirable thing. But if he entertains spiritual sense, he will know that he is convinced of the reality of God and His spiritual ideas, and that he is possessed of the evidence that these are unfailingly trustworthy. This is "the great attainment," as Mrs. Eddy has labeled it, and the method of its realization she has stated in numerous ways, as, for example (Science and Health, p. 167), "We apprehend Life in divine Science only as we live above corporeal sense and correct it."

George Channing