AS commonly understood, we live in two realms, a material and a spiritual, and while we are said to derive our ideals from the spiritual, they need to be adjusted, in their practical adaptation, to the exigencies of the material. This teaching, however, Mrs. Eddy most emphatically repudiates, and an authoritative word' from so-called physical science endorses her position. This word, as all know who have kept in touch with late scientific reports, is to the effect that matter is not composed of atoms, as had previously been supposed, but that its apparent substantiality is made up of "force." Some natural scientists long since decided that the motive power back of this "force" is an "infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed ;" while among religious authorities the intelligence back of all real "force" has been declared to be none other than God.
Mrs. Eddy's theory of the unreality of matter, which she discovered through spiritual apprehension in 1866, and published in the Christian Science text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," in 1875, differs radically from this in its insistence that matter is but a projection of mortal mind. A Christian Scientist realizes, as does any sensible man, that to mortal sense we live in a material realm; but he knows that the spiritual only is the real; and he understands that as we journey Godward our standards should partake more and more of the spiritual and less and less of the material. He believes, with Paul, that the old man should be put off and the new man put on; and that to measure man, who is wholly spiritual, by a mixed standard of materiality and spirituality is to degrade the true sense of man, belittle our sense of God, and place a block in the way of further spiritual progress. He remembers Paul's words : "I have fed you with milk, and not with meat : for hitherto ye were not able to bear it ;" but he believes that the day of spiritual babes has passed, and the time arrived for men to rise in the strength of this realization of man's oneness with God.
The Christian Scientist does not assume, for instance, that the buildings of San Francisco which fell with disastrous results were unreal to the physical senses; but he does try to remember the unreal nature of all material things, and he agrees with those who say that the realm of the real was not shaken and devastated by earthquake and fire. He realizes that what underlies outward manifestation and makes Chicago's greatest statue great, is not its stone, but St. Gaudens' comprehension of the nobility of thought, the strength of purpose, the simple grandeur of Lincoln, and the wonderful skill with which he has conveyed that comprehension to us. He applies to literature, to music, to architecture, to all the arts, this same idea that the real is "that which is eternal and incapable of discord and decay" (Science and Health, p. 468), and thus his religion enters every vital experience of his life. Through life's experiences lie learns that our Lord's statement, "He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it," may mean that he who rejects much of what the world now considers wisdom and follows after Truth, leaves behind him many vagaries of the erring human mind, falls heir to the attributes of divine Mind, and finds his real life and happiness in fulfilling God's purpose. When the question of right and wrong is involved, he tries to pattern his conduct after the one irreproachable model, the one perfect type of justice, of purity, and of truth, who came down to the level of the understanding of men, lived and worked and suffered as we live and work and suffer (though we have no record that he was ever sick), and consented to face even death that he might prove to all men that matter is indeed unreal.
