The eleventh chapter of Hebrews begins with the following verse: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Faith is an excellent and a helpful quality, but the demonstration of Christian Science requires something more than mere faith. Scientific demonstration requires spiritual understanding based on the knowledge of God as omnipotent, omnipresent, omniactive Mind, or divine Principle. Of such understanding it may be truly said that it is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
Referring to the so-called miracle performed by Christ Jesus in feeding the multitude when the supply of available food seemed limited to five loaves and two fishes, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, asks this arresting question: "How were the loaves and fishes multiplied on the shores of Galilee,—and that, too, without meal or monad from which loaf or fish could come?" (See "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," p. 90.) Mrs. Eddy herself answers this question in different places in the Christian Science textbook. For example, she says on page 206 of Science and Health, "In the scientific relation of God to man, we find that whatever blesses one blesses all, as Jesus showed with the loaves and the fishes,—Spirit, not matter, being the source of supply." The words "Spirit, not matter, being the source of supply" indicate very plainly that the feeding of the multitude was, from the standpoint of Christian Science, not miraculous, but was a divinely natural manifestation in human experience of the fact that supply is primarily mental or spiritual.
It should not, however, be supposed that Christian Science sanctions the belief that Jesus in any way mentally manipulated the thought of the people so that they merely exchanged the belief of being hungry for the belief that their hunger was satisfied. Nevertheless, the whole experience of eating and drinking is in the realm of human belief because spiritual man, created in God's likeness, does not eat to live. On the contrary, he is sustained by divine Principle, which is his Life.
