There is surely no sentence in the English language more compact with scientific meaning than that, on page 468 of Science and Health, which runs, "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all." The reader who has mastered the significance of this saying, even in a slight degree, has embarked upon a voyage into the spiritual world, bursting through the fogs of materiality into the sunlight of Truth, and gaining through the experience an ever broadening perception of the intention of another passage, this time on page 123 of Science and Health, in which Mrs. Eddy says, "Divine Science, rising above physical theories, excludes matter, resolves things into thoughts, and replaces the objects of material sense with spiritual ideas." The student of Christian Science, who has succeeded in reducing these sayings to practice, finds himself living in a world not of independent material objects, but of spiritual ideas subject to divine law, and thus, as he reads the printed words of the Bible, discovers that, to take a single example, the house in which he dwells is no material habitation, but entirely a condition of consciousness, and that thus it was that the psalmist could sing, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever."
Translated into terms of human endeavor, this means that a man becomes his own architect in a way he may scarcely have dreamed of before. In the dream of his desire, he may elect for the simplicity and dignity of a Wren, or he may rejoice in the lavish ostentation of the rococo builder, but he will be fashioning not things but thoughts, and his material will be not stone and wood but character, and it is well to remember that "except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it." The reminder is a very simple one, and yet it is apt to be much neglected. In the rush and striving of human existence men and women are only too prone to be shortsighted; to spend themselves in battling for the gratification of their passions, rather than for the subjection of them; and to forget entirely that warning of Carlyle's, "The house that is a-building looks not as the house that is built." The world is, indeed, composed very largely of the descendants of the builders of Babel; and it was because Mrs. Eddy understood this so thoroughly that she wrote, on page 248 of Science and Health, "We must form perfect models in thought and look at them continually, or we shall never carve them out in grand and noble lives."
It is in this effort to carve out a grand and noble life that the individual becomes the builder of his own house, and takes for his model, in the measure of his own sense of what is grand and noble, either some tenement of clay or "an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." The writers of the Bible understood this so clearly that they made perpetual use of the word house to describe the consciousness of the individual. "Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation," writes the psalmist, "there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling." It would hardly be possible to say more clearly that happiness and safety are dependent upon living in obedience to Principle. It would certainly have been quite impossible for a writer in Judea of old to have said it with less circumlocution. Yet the world which reads these words to-day, like the generations which have pored over them in the past, has persisted in pursuing happiness in the form of some sensuous Fata Morgana, and in seeking safety in the advice of a physician or behind the walls of a Plessis-les-Tours. All this is and has been, of course, because men would not and will not learn to resolve things into thoughts, much less to deny the reality of things as material, and to acclaim the spiritual as the real, in other words to admit that "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all." The fact obviously is that in order to prove Spirit to be All-in-all, a man must be ready to denounce matter at every point, and this again is precisely what humanity is not and has never been prepared to do. Yet until this is done the fortress a man builds for himself must remain the Cæur de Lion's Castle of Butter rather than his Château-Gaillard.
