IN her book "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy indicates that thought must extend beyond mere belief and faith, beyond materiality, beyond custom. While her revelation of Christian Science is complete and final, she offered many hints on relatively unexplored avenues of thinking, and she encouraged among her followers the habit of studying the Bible and her writings to ponder these hints and to write about them, thus reaching to higher levels of thought as fast as students could be made ready for a favorable reception of the ever-expanding truth of being. In this way the student of Christian Science builds up his understanding and enlarges the basis of his demonstration.
One such hint that our Leader gives us is this passage from "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 22): "Christian Science translates Mind, God, to mortals. It is the infinite calculus defining the line, plane, space, and fourth dimension of Spirit." Here she indicates that God, Spirit, transcends the three-dimensional world of the bodily senses. Now, where did the Discoverer of Christian Science learn of Spirit and its four dimensions? Obviously not from mathematics—first, because she was not a student of higher mathematics, and secondly, because mathematics does not deal with the qualities of God. But here is the key to the answer: Mrs. Eddy studied the Scriptures and found that God dwells in a realm not limited to our world of length, breadth, and thickness—north and south, east and west, up and down. Suppose, therefore, that we too search the Bible to discover the evidences of higher realms.
First, however, let us turn aside to see clearly what is meant in mathematics by a fourth dimension. On a horizontal surface a line pointing north is perpendicular to one pointing east, and a line pointing straight up is at right angles to both of these other two. Each is perpendicular to the others. Very well then; now draw a fourth line at right angles to each of the other three. This would be a line in the fourth dimension. You say that this is incomprehensible and cannot be done. And so it is to the mortal senses. But the writers on the subject of hyperspace have shown that to a people who lived in a two-dimensional world our concept of "up" would be sheer nonsense; up would mean north to them. One writer describes a hypothetical "Flatland," and recounts the story of one individual who conceived the idea of a third dimension, and experienced it. To his neighbors he had completely disappeared because he had risen "above" Flatland, although he could still see them and could now see the "inside" of "closed" houses.
