Sometimes the student of religion, and more often the skeptic, is put off by Christ Jesus' statements pertaining to the real substance of life as he saw it. Statements such as "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven" Matt. 6:19, 20; may send a shiver of recoil through the human mind. Why? Because it sees in them a denial of pleasure, a call to otherworldliness, a loss of the luxury of human life.
But a thorough grasp of the Christ Science behind Jesus' statement will assure one that it was precisely against loss that he was trying to protect us. He used the metaphors of moth, rust, and thieves to make vivid the frequent deterioration of materially based constructs, including those treasures of home, family, vocation—everything that ostensibly goes to make up human fulfillment.
The Science back of his teachings shows that, contrary to the popular and scholarly theology of intervening centuries, the treasures we are to seek are not in another world, either of the future or the remotely abstract. They are simply in another mental level than that in which we customarily look for them. Or to put it another way, the real and only world, the one we live in now and forever, is composed of different elements from those that appear humanly. Actually, the only universe there is, has been, or ever can be is the universe whose components are spiritual concepts and not the hundred-odd material elements composing the periodic table. And an understanding of this eternal fact will help liberate us from the destructibility inherent in the materially viewed universe.
