IN Christian communities, churches and chapels dotted among domestic and industrial buildings indicate the spiritual aspiration in human thought, its desire to be governed rightly, and its tacit admission that this government is inherent in something higher than materiality. Diversity of religious views has led to the bitterest controversies and persecutions. Yet all the time there is but one creator, one God, spiritually discernible. The gods of mythology are classified as superstition; but much religious superstition still remains to be expunged from human thought before the worship of the one God, infinite Spirit, can bring humanity together on the basis of true monotheism and scientific spiritual government.
Christian Science lifts thought above mere religious belief in Deity to a scientific and demonstrable understanding of government by the one God, or divine Principle. Universal humanity is destined to understand and utilize this power whereby the misgovernment leading to strikes, wars, poverty, disease, death, will be ruled out. The one means of defense from all these evils is spiritual defense.
Mrs. Eddy writes (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 222), "Mankind will be God-governed in proportion as God's government becomes apparent, the Golden Rule utilized, and the rights of man and the liberty of conscience held sacred." The rights of man include spiritual purity, health, prosperity, peace, and joy — all of them perpetual. The highest and holiest right of an individual is his right to be governed, guarded, and guided at all times by divine Principle. The effect of Christian Science upon all who practice it is to lift from them the burden of fear, to relax tension, and to enhance that spiritual teachableness through which all may be brought under the beneficent government of divine Love. Estrangements, disasters, diseases, named and nameless discords, are all of them traceable to total ignorance of Deity, or else to confused religious views. The true understanding of the creator alone can bring to the race regeneration and liberation.
