STUDENTS of Mrs. Eddy's text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," will recall the passage in which she says that we must "rise into higher and holier consciousness" (p. 419). To many this may suggest the interminable progress of mankind toward the realization of infinite good. In our aspiration toward spiritual fulness we have a vision of ourselves rising to loftier gradations of conscious thought, until we become at last completely identified with the ineffable nature of God. This will be the realization of man's true selfhood, and it is the very opposite of extinction. It is well if we make it plain to ourselves that our immediate aim is spiritual efficiency and our ultimate goal divine perfection. We combine a practical idealism in the present with a transcendental expectation for eternity.
To make the issue more distinctive, let us examine an objection which is frequently offered. Critics of Christian Science fall into the error of supposing that the object of the system is primarily a mere physical healing or regeneration, with reference to particular cases as these may arise. Then follows their attack: "The body is not the proper subject for a great religion. We should look to moral and spiritual problems—they alone are worthy of an exalted faith." In such terms our friends would at once admonish and advise us. Be it said to their credit that they themselves rather despise the material world as a material world—they recognize its inferiority and would fain soar above its limitations. That is the ground of their quarrel against us: we seem to them to meddle unduly with what they depreciate. They would fain soar—if only they could discover how. But their logic toward us is defective in that they confuse physical diseases (which they consider as being out of keeping with a pure religious activity) with a spiritual means which Christian Science offers as the one effective cure of disease; that is to say, the divine agency of the cure is prejudiced for them by the nature of the evils it would obliterate.
Now, it cannot be too strongly urged that the Christian Science conception of life and things is a spiritual one— that is, non-material. Any admission of the existence of matter on the part of a Christian Scientist is a concession to sense-consciousness, which latter is incapable of valid judgments as to the real nature of anything, and which at the same time retards the progress of the individual. When Christian Science says to a sick person, "Yes, your sickness is real enough to you," it passes on to the deeper affirmation: "Your true selfhood is clean and whole." This latter statement is the verdict of the "higher and holier consciousness."
