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A JOURNAL FAMILY ALBUM

Appreciating one hundred years of spiritual insight and healing

In January we began a series in appreciation of the Journal's contribution to the twentieth century. This month we reprint an article and two testimonies from the period 1951-1960. The article shows the profound practicality of understanding the Lord's Prayer in its spiritual meaning. In this understanding we find the remedy for disease, failure, lack, racial conflict. The testimonies illustrate the power of Christian Science in healing a wide range of troubles, from disease to smoking and drinking habits to the effects of an accident.

FROM THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE JOURNAL FEBRUARY 1960

The coincidence of the human and divine

From the June 2000 issue of The Christian Science Journal


The Lord's Prayer embodies the revelation of the human and divine coincidence. This coincidence is an important point in the theology of Christian Science, for in revealing the allness of God, Christian Science reveals the nothingness of matter and declares with infallible logic that all that exists here, now, everywhere, is God and His idea. There are not two states of existence. Christian Science proves the fallacy of material sense testimony at every point. It causes us to see that the human is not an imperfect state of existence which will sometime become spiritual, but is an imperfect sense of the divinity which is here and now the actual, the real, the tangible, the true. That which is divine is imperishable, perfect, complete. Nothing can be added to it nor anything taken from it.

In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, says, "John saw the human and divine coincidence, shown in the man Jesus, as divinity embracing humanity in Life and its demonstration,—reducing to human perception and understanding the Life which is God." And she adds, "In divine revelation, material and corporeal selfhood disappear, and the spiritual idea is understood." Science and Health, p. 561. Making God the starting point and reasoning from cause to effect, Christian Science proves with scientific certainty that man, God's image, is wholly spiritual and exists forever at the standpoint of perfection.

So when the Lord's Prayer starts with "Our Father which art in heaven," Matt. 6:9. it is not saying that God is the Father of mortals. Rather is it saying that because God, Spirit—revealed in Christian Science as Father-Mother—is the Father of man, man is wholly spiritual; and there are in reality no mortals, for like begets like. And so in the light of this great prayer, we can look up and say: No, I am not a little finite mortal, aging, frail, and hastening toward death. My individuality and identity are spiritual, here and now, held forever in the conscious harmony, perfection, and perpetuity of Life.

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