Mary Baker Eddy, in delivering her Message to The Mother Church for 1902, wrote (p. 10): "When the human mind is advancing above itself towards the Divine, it is subjugating the body, subduing matter, taking steps outward and upwards. This upward tendency of humanity will finally gain the scope of Jacob's vision, and rise from sense to Soul, from earth to heaven." In these wonderful statements, our Leader has pointed out the path that all humanity must some day tread, the path that leads to the knowledge, appreciation, and demonstration of infinite being, spiritual bliss, eternal life.
Instead of regarding this desirable state of consciousness as belonging to the distant future, Mrs. Eddy's discovery of Christian Science has made it a present possibility. Even long ago Jacob beheld in a vision the path leading upward as a "ladder ... and the top of it reached to heaven" (Gen. 28:12).
To a world more or less educated to a finite view of infinity, it appears most improbable that men should expect to find immediate and personal benefit from the study of what is supposedly an abstract subject. But Christian Science takes another view. Commonly, the scope of infinity is conceived of as beyond the nearest stars, as boundless stellar space, something therefore having no immediate or important bearing upon the life of the individual. But even the "infinitude" of stellar space has been queried by astrophysicists, some agreeing that it is "curved," others that it has an outside limit. Christian Science points out that conjecture on the nature of the material universe cannot have any bearing or benefit upon the lives of men, whose real source is Spirit, Life, God, the infinite One.
