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Articles

GOVERNMENT BY PRINCIPLE

From the May 1920 issue of The Christian Science Journal


Heaven is man's necessity. When analyzed, man's every effort is to achieve some concept of heaven,—or, as too often proves the case, some misconception of heaven,—which seems to promise, as he reaches for it, to add something to his sum of good.

Human ingenuity has left no heaven-bound theory untried, from the impoverished outlook of the ascetic, striving to hold himself physically aloof from matter, to the exaggerated viewpoint of the man who cannot conceive heaven outside of the intensification of matter and its arguments. Both these extremes are equally an acknowledgment of matter, and both meet and fail upon the common hypothesis that man and the universe are material. If heaven could be worked out from a material standpoint, the world would not today be perplexed with the mighty unrest of unsolved problems.

Bible history is clearly and repeatedly contrasting the potency of thought awake to God's government, with the confusion and impotence resulting from ignorance of Principle; and understanding is found unfolding, whether from Egypt or Bethany, through obtaining and holding as true its relationship to Principle. Man is spiritual and must be so comprehended. He is spiritual and must be spiritually satisfied through expressing the demands of Principle. "I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness," sang David, when he beheld the uplifting fact of man's absolute dependence upon God.

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