THESE DAYS PEOPLE everywhere are seeking alternatives to commonly accepted procedures, whether for personal care, business, politics, the environment, or just guidelines for living. In part, they feel an intuitive sense that there has to be something better than what conventional approaches offer—a conviction that another dimension to life has yet to be fully explored. Of course, this conviction is not unique to modern life. Thinkers throughout the ages have always harbored these intuitions and sometimes, to the extent that they acted on them, changed the course of history.
One such thinker, Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, or what she often referred to as the Science of being, held to similar convictions about the nature of life. She wrote in her autobiography: "From my very childhood I was impelled, by a hunger and thirst after divine things,—a desire for something higher and better than matter, and apart from it,—to seek diligently for the knowledge of God as the one great and ever-present relief from human woe" (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 31).
Her search touches a chord that resonates within many. Surely there must be something "higher and better than matter, and apart from it." Eventually she found that "something," and spent the rest of her life trying to make her discovery plain to others. In her words, this discovery was "Life in and of Spirit; this Life being the sole reality of existence" (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 24).
