"With one Father, even God, the whole family of man would be brethren; and with one Mind and that God, or good, the brotherhood of man would consist of Love and Truth, and have unity of Principle and spiritual power which constitute divine Science." So writes Mrs. Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp. 469, 470).
It is in this true sense of brotherhood, a sense which Christ Jesus stressed, that Christian Scientists keep alive in their thought the fact that those who have gone on have the same everlasting Father that we have—God. We realize that from the standpoint of man's unity with God these individuals embody and express immortal qualities and that these qualities constitute their deathless identity.
Even a slight recognition of this fact assures us that as we grow in spiritual perception and discernment we shall cease honoring death as an actuality and realize that the mortal belief in death cannot separate identities from each other any more than it can separate them from God.
Paul declared (Rom. 8:38, 39), "Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Materially speaking, men and women appear to be physical organisms, completely dependent upon matter for their identity. Such a concept raises the question of how mindless elements of matter can be considered either the source or the medium of intelligence and life.
This is a question with which people have been struggling for ages. Loren Eiseley, University Professor of Anthropology and the History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, made the following statements in an address, excerpts from which appeared in the "Signs of the Times" column in the Christian Science Sentinel of July 11, 1964. He said, in part: "I who write these words on paper cannot establish my own reality. I am, by any reasonable and considered logic, dead. ...There is no life in the carbon in my body....There is no life in the iron, there is no life in the phosphorus, the nitrogen does not contain me, the water that soaks my tissues is not I."
To the natural scientist, whose interest lies in the realm of observable phenomena, metaphysical conceptions may appear to be of no particular interest or value. But that need not be the case. When one arbitrarily designates observable phenomena as matter, he merely entertains a material sense of what he observes. Nor is there any real justification in believing that there are two opposing powers or principalities in the universe, one of which is good and the other evil, or that man is constituted of two original and independent elements, matter and Mind. For one thing, such beliefs stand opposed to the Scriptural statement (Isa. 45:22), "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else."
In Science and Health we read (p. 555), "Only impotent error would seek to unite Spirit with matter, good with evil, immortality with mortality, and call this sham unity man, as if man were the offspring of both Mind and matter, of both Deity and humanity."
We may entertain a material sense of the universe. We may hold to an erring sense of what is true. But this in no way makes material that which is spiritual or makes false that which is true. What it does is merely to give an unrealistic sense of what one is observing or trying to understand.
Take, for example, what appears to be the action of the heart. From the standpoint of Christian Science, one realizes that this action is a particular manifestation of divine Mind which in reality has nothing whatever to do with matter. Mrs. Eddy writes (ibid., p. 419): "Mind produces all action. If the action proceeds from Truth, from immortal Mind, there is harmony; but mortal mind is liable to any phase of belief."
So, in Christian Science we understand that as there is only one Mind, there is but one action. What material sense calls heart action is in reality the action of Mind, not of matter. This action partakes of the nature of its source and is harmonious, restful, purposeful. The integrity of what is humanly referred to as heart action is in Mind, not in heart or in matter.
The spiritual understanding of this fact applied to the human situation restores normal heart action by showing beliefs of diseased action, impaired action, overaction, labored action, or inaction to be without a true basis. Supported by this understanding, human thought ceases to misinterpret the nature of the only action there really is and so stops objectifying its false beliefs on the body in what seem to be diseased conditions of the heart.
When the heart stops beating, material sense concludes that one is dead. However, Christian Science holds that because the individual's relationship to God is spiritual, and thus eternal, his life was never in material elements. Being inseparable from God, divine Mind, man is inseparable from Life, regardless of the generally accepted belief that he lives and dies in a physical body.
Spiritual sense enables one to see above and beyond the limits of material sense, with its inevitable inaccuracies, into the realm of scientific metaphysics—the spiritual realm—and to gain a satisfying sense of Paul's statement to the people on Mars' Hill (Acts 17:28), "In him we live, and move, and have our being."
