“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Dante’s epic poem, The Divine Comedy, certainly presents an arresting image of the gates of hell. We learn in Christian Science, though, that far from being an eternal, physical (or metaphysical) location, hell is actually a belief—a belief that an independently thinking and acting entity exists outside the ever-present divine Mind, God. Therefore, hell is a mental state. And much like Dante implies, losing hope is a first step in this mental hell.
As one of the three enduring qualities (faith, hope, and love) that Paul mentions in his first letter to the Corinthians (see I Corinthians 13:13), hope is essential to the practice of Christianity. But it is difficult to practice something without understanding its nature and source.
One dictionary defines hope as “the highest degree of well founded expectation of good” (Noah Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828). Such expectation requires us to look away from the temporal and into the eternal. Mary Baker Eddy, the Founder of Christian Science, states that hope is related to spiritual sense: “Spiritual sense, contradicting the material senses, involves intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition, reality” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 298).
