Today, with nuclear war a threat, a number of people, especially young people, have reached a point where the future seems so doubtful for them that they rebel at living within the established customs and rules of society. The governing fears are expressed in such words as: "I see no future for us," and, "Someday someone in authority will press a button, and we shall all be blown up."

This sense of anxiety and futility is replaced by peace and purpose as through our study of Christian Science we grow in the understanding of the nature of the universe and its governing Principle, God. Principle governs its infinite creation, including man, in complete harmony and order, and we have only to live in accord with God's spiritual laws to experience this harmony. Christ Jesus understood God as the all-knowing and all-loving Father, who knows and supplies every need, and who ordains only good for His creation. Evil and destruction are not part of His plan for His children.

It was this understanding of God which enabled Jesus to say: "Ye cannot serve God and mammon" (Matt. 6:24), and also (verse 34), "Take... no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself." Instead of worrying over the future, we can put our whole trust in God as an ever-present help to whom we can turn in any extremity with the utmost assurance that He will guide and guard us in the right way. We can know that, since man is the image and likeness of God, he is governed at all times by divine intelligence.

If God is All, as the Bible teaches, there can be nothing except God and His manifestation, and God must be the very Life of all things, and all the Mind and intelligence there is. We cannot in reality have a life and mind that is separate from God and that can be destroyed. Our safety and immortality are the outcome of our being the reflection of eternal Life and Mind. God and man are one as divine Mind and its spiritual idea. Man expresses God's infinite, ever-unfolding ideas, and this is the whole purpose of his existence.

Any other view is a misconception of reality. If man were a speck of matter, animated by a material brain, at the mercy of material laws, and subject to the evil elements of the carnal mind, annihilation would be inevitable for him, but such a view is a mistaken picture of the unreliable physical senses.

So-called material existence, with its increasing fears and anxieties, is not a reality from which one cannot escape. It is a falsity which the Christ, Truth, dispels. It is our misconception of life which has to change, not life itself.

To take "no thought for the morrow" is not fatalism, nor did Christ Jesus mean that we should lower our ideals or adopt a careless and irresponsible attitude towards living standards. Such an outlook would be understandable, however mistaken, if man really faced destruction; those who hold such an opinion need our utmost compassion and help. Jesus' statement, on the contrary, implies the need of a vigorous effort to live in accord with the highest spiritual ideals, since each one must find his true selfhood in Christ, the spiritual idea of sonship.

In the third chapter of his second Epistle, Peter, referring to the eventual dissolution of the material heavens and earth, wrote (verses 11,12), "Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy Conversation and godliness, looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?"

Christian Science teaches that God is Spirit and that all His creation, man and the universe, is spiritual. Matter and all materiality must therefore be a false sense of things and must finally disappear in the light of Truth. It is only this false sense that will be destroyed, while the individuality and identity of man as the reflection of Spirit are preserved forever.

Neither nuclear explosion nor any other form of destructive matter has the power to harm God's spiritual creation. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 97), "The more destructive matter becomes, the more its nothingness will appear, until matter reaches its mortal zenith in illusion and forever disappears." She adds in the same paragraph, "The more material the belief, the more obvious its error, until divine Spirit, supreme in its domain, dominates all matter, and man is found in the likeness of Spirit, his original being."

Since Spirit, God, is All and His infinite idea, man and the universe, is spiritual, then the material heavens and earth, however real to the physical senses, are only misconceptions or the false sense of the real creation. As Truth dawns on human consciousness, every false concept in mortal mind will be destroyed, for the light of spiritual understanding dispels the darkness of error. Although there may be great upheavals as error is destroyed, the true being of men as the image and likeness of God will be untouched and will endure forever.

In the knowledge of man's immortality we should strive to express our true identity as the reflection of Spirit, for the future holds no fear for us when we learn the powerlessness of evil to touch anything that God has made. As we identify ourselves with all that is good and cast out of consciousness all that must eventually be destroyed—all error —we can experience divine protection now. Every sinful thought overcome, and every Christlike quality expressed, is a step nearer realizing our spiritual and immortal selfhood. Instead of assuming destruction, we may here and now identify ourselves with all that is indestructible and eternal.

Worthwhile purpose instead of drifting and a satisfying effort to face problems instead of avoiding them come as a result of putting our thinking on the basis of man's present perfection and immortality as the child of God now. We find real happiness and freedom not in shelving all responsibility but in recognizing that we are responsible to God, and putting this into practice daily. Undertaking this responsibility leads not only to rewarding activity but to protection from all evil.

In "Christian Healing," Mrs. Eddy, speaking of a grand truth that is hidden from us, writes (p. 5), "This truth is, that we are to work out our own salvation, and to meet the responsibility of our own thoughts and acts; relying not on the person of God or the person of man to do our work for us, but on the apostle's rule, 'I will show thee my faith by my works.'"