The telephone rang; it was a long-distance call. "Where are you?" I asked the patient who was calling. "I am in Chicago," he replied, "and I am in trouble." He gave the details. Later came a call from one who said she was in San Francisco and was "in great fear and confusion." As I listened to these statements the questions presented themselves: Is what they are saying as to their whereabouts true? Is the child of God, the one and only man, actually in what human thought says is Chicago, San Francisco, or any other humanly defined place? Is the idea, or reflection, of divine Mind in trouble, in pain, in fear or confusion? Can the individual evidence of positive Mind be in anything but Mind? The answer was an unequivocal "No."
The postman came. In the mail were letters asking for help from one who said he was badly in debt; another stated she was in a position where she was the object of jealousy; a third declared she was in an unhappy home. A fourth was concerned with problems incident to his being in politics. Again I realized that in order to help these individuals I had to see the spiritual fact: that no child of God can ever be in any state of mortal mind's making, because all individual being is of, and in, and conditioned by the one causative Mind, God.
I looked out of the window and saw two men in an argument, two dogs in a fight, a woman in a hurry, and some people in a bus. Apparently all were believing they were in physical bodies. The little word in, when used to describe the whereabouts of individuals, I saw, was very meaningful. If used materially, it completely misstates man's whereabouts. Used spiritually, it describes man's living oneness, or unity, with God. How careful we need to be to keep clearly before us just what we and our brother are "in," and so correct the false suggestions of the human mind that we are where we are not. In her work "Retrospection and Introspection" Mary Baker Eddy writes (p. 93): "St. Paul said to the Athenians, 'For in Him we live, and move, and have our being.' This statement is in substance identical with my own: 'There is no life, truth, substance, nor intelligence in matter.' It is quite clear that as yet this grandest verity has not been fully demonstrated, but it is nevertheless true." The nothingness of matter points to man's includedness in Mind. What Mrs. Eddy called "this grandest verity" is that man lives in God, and not in any form of substanceless matter, animate or inanimate. Here, then, is the objective of our being, to demonstrate, step by step, this grandest of verities.
