All reasonable people will agree that there is no substance in the figures that move about in our dreams, or in those moving on the cinema screen; also that the events of dreams and the activities of fictional characters are not really happening—that they are all illusion and make-believe. Christian Science teaches us that many of the events of what men call "real life," which we enter when we leave the cinema or when we wake from our dreams, are make-believe too, the illusions that mortal mind is presenting to us day by day, and year by year, yea, even hour by hour; that they are not a bit more real than the dream shadows, the phantoms of memory, or the cinema films. If one accepts "the scientific statement of being" as given by Mary Baker Eddy in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 468), it is impossible to believe otherwise, for this statement reads in part, "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all."
Christian Science also unfolds to us the great truth that the expression of this infinite Mind, the spiritual universe, including man, is the only creation, and that it has eternally existed and functioned, though unseen to mortal eyes, and continues to do so under Mind's jurisdiction in perfect harmony, undisturbed by, in fact oblivious of, the constantly changing panorama of the material dream.
We cannot perceive this wonderful universe while we continue satisfied with the material illusion, but as we study our textbooks, the Bible and Science and Health, the light of Truth wakens us, and we begin to see the beauty and reality of the things of Spirit, and consequently the unreality of matter. But if we refuse the truth and say of matter, "It is so beautiful that it must be true," or, "It is so terrible that I am afraid of it," we are accepting mortal mind claims—all its films of sin, sickness, and death—as realities, and as long as we are thus bound we shall suffer the resultant evils.
