History follows the course of what men count dear. Their sense of values from the brutally materialistic to the purely Christlike has determined what has happened in the world. Often there have been dominant individuals and groups whose ideals were fraught with justice, mercy, and freedom. There have been others who sought material advantage at the cost of progress Spiritward.

In human reckoning, people's ideals and their concept of God coincide. Mary Baker Eddy says in "The People's Idea of God" (pp. 6, 7), "Periods and peoples are characterized by their highest or their lowest ideals, by their God and their devil."

Today the distinction between materialistic ideals and spiritual ones is becoming sharper. The reason for this is that the Science of God and man, Christian Science, has revealed the idealism of absolute spiritual being, in which perfect God and perfect man are understood to be the only reality. So dear do scientific Christians count this idealism that they let it dominate every aim and activity of their lives. They freely abandon material standards of success, material methods of healing, material dependencies, all that would prevent their proving that God is their All.

In contrast with this rising sense of values, Christendom is confronted with avowed materialists, who contend that they can build a world upon the flimsy basis of matter and produce a race of clever mortals capable of subduing their environment without God, or divine Principle, being involved.

Such materialists little realize that they are seeking satisfaction in illusion, happiness in a dream, substance in the unsubstantial. The delusion of the temporal sense of existence possesses them. So widespread is this materialism that many well-intentioned theists are influenced by its spirit and find themselves trying to hold to God on the one hand and to satisfaction in the ephemeral on the other.

If individuals count sensual enjoyment more dear than Christliness, or material gain more dear than spirituality, they are not following the uncompromising path of loyalty to Spirit and its allness. They are taking a dead-end road, which never opens up the broader, fairer views of life in God and which must be retraced with painful footsteps of spiritual regeneration and effort.

There can be no compromise with materialism for the true Christian Scientist. Take dependence upon material means for healing, for instance. In "Miscellaneous Writings," Mrs. Eddy takes up a question concerning the advisibility of using medicine in order to produce a cure which is slow in starting. Part of her answer is (p. 53), "You only weaken your power to heal through Mind, by any compromise with matter; which is virtually acknowledging that under difficulties the former is not equal to the latter." The patient who holds dear a full dependence upon God for healing is building for eternity, advancing beyond the primitive belief that health is in matter or that life is in a physical body.

Christ Jesus knew that the personal concept of family, so often held dear in selfish, unwholesome intensity, should be replaced with the larger concept of God's universal family. When told that his family were without, calling him, he said (Mark 3:35), "Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother." Yet there is evidence that his higher concept of family did not cause the Master to neglect filial duties, for even on the cross he asked his beloved disciple, John, to care for his mother as would a son. When we count God's family dear, our affection for those near us is deepened, never lessened.

Our profession or occupation should be counted dear to us only in the measure that it serves eternal, Christly values. What we are required to do humanly, we can carry out intelligently and helpfully to the glory of God, not of ourselves. In this way the human sense of our activity becomes subservient to the spiritual activity it represents.

We count Christian Science dear in the measure of our understanding of its significance. If we reckon it as a mere cure-all, we are likely to lose it. If we grasp the profound meaning of its appearing as the final revelation in its universal glory of the Christ, the spiritual idea of sonship, we shall progress in power to help free humanity from the curse of mortality.

Mrs. Eddy writes in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p.195), "Christian Science is at length learned to be no miserable piece of ideal legerdemain, by which we poor mortals expect to live and die, but a deep-drawn breath fresh from God, by whom and in whom man lives, moves, and has deathless being."

When all mankind come to count God and His creation of spiritual ideas dearer beyond all earthly treasures, the kingdom of heaven will appear in its fullness. The material, temporal scene will vanish, for the reward of such ideal cherishing is the pure consciousness of the divinely real.

Helen Wood Bauman