Not long ago I received in the mail a tiny metal box with a note pasted on it: "Small parts. Open with care." A letter explained that these parts were the focus of a physics research project at a large university. The sender was the professor in charge of the project, and, he explained, Christian Science had been the key to its success.

It was a study of electrical resistance of metallic copper. A great increase of resistance in the copper appears when a trace of iron has been dissolved in it. This seems to defy explanation. The project involved measurements at very low temperatures and very high pressures (–269°C and 1 million plus pounds per square inch). The measuring process involved a piece of copper set in between two tiny pieces of soft stone with platinum wires connected to the copper —all the work having to be done under a microscope. Because the stone was soft, pressure should have caused it to flow around the wires and hold them in place. But the flow could not be contained or controlled. Short circuits followed. An epoxy layer between the stones and the copper was tried, but still no success.

Intensive effort to solve this problem over a period of months produced only failures. Finally the professor, a student of Christian Science, called a practitioner, explained the problem, and asked for prayerful help. The practitioner quickly pointed out that the problem was one of seeing the nothingness of matter and the allness of Mind.

Both the professor and the practitioner agreed to work on this basis. In a few hours the thought occurred to double the thickness of the epoxy layer, and from that time on there were no further failures. And the professor wrote that "where all of us had been quite tired, there was an immediate gain in spontaneity and freshness [following the practitioner's work], not only by the men doing the above project, but by the entire group of graduate students working under me."

Most of the projects we work on day by day seem to involve both matter and Mind. Christian Science defines matter as the subjective state of mortal mind, and mortal mind is but a false claim of mental power opposed to God, the divine Mind. In the Glossary of the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy gives a detailed definition of this false, so-called mind. It begins, "Mortal Mind. Nothing claiming to be something, for Mind is immortal." Included in her definition of "matter," on the same page, are these words: "another name for mortal mind; illusion; intelligence, substance, and life in non-intelligence and mortality." ^{Science and Health, p. 591;}

Whenever we think our problem involves matter, material things, material personalities, organic relationships of material parts, the solution can be found by understanding that matter is "another name for mortal mind" and that mortal mind is "nothing, claiming to be something, for Mind is immortal."

The limitation, frustration, complication, disunity, contradiction, inharmony, threatened disaster, we may face, may seem to be a problem of finding an adjustment in matter. But matter itself is not substance; it is only a belief. And the only way to improve a belief is to apply to it the truth: God the only Mind, and matter an illusion of false belief. The effect of this is not to have all that we believe necessary to our existence—including the project we may be working on—blow up on us, or vanish, but to have the illusion that matter is self-acting intelligence or substance yield to the fact that Mind, divine intelligence, governs all. The result may appear to be an adjustment in matter, but it is only one of the many proofs we will experience as we progress toward the demonstration of ultimate reality, in which matter ceases to be even a belief.

None of this, of course, makes any sense in a material frame of reference. We might paraphrase Christ Jesus' words, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." ^{John 3:6.} One accustomed to reasoning from a material standpoint may have difficulty in seeing any logic in spiritual truths; but one who begins to acknowledge spiritual reality begins a rebirth. And this rebirth takes him through demonstration after demonstration of the superiority of Spirit, Mind, over matter-beliefs to the kingdom of Mind, where all is Mind and its perfect manifestation.

Carl J. Welz