Articles

Along with the present resurgence of belief in many forms of the occult, one may hear the terms "religion" and "magic" used as if they were almost interchangeable. It is even sometimes suggested that both ways of looking at the world are based only on beliefs about how a material man struggles to control his material world.

When the prophet Gad advised King David to purchase Araunah's threshing floor and build there an altar to God to stay a plague, Araunah wished to make David a present of the threshing floor and of everything needed for the sacrifice. But David's thoughtful reply was that he would buy it all at a price; he would not offer unto God that which cost him nothing.

Regardless of our present perception of things, the spiritual facts of existence remain unshakable. A glimpse of this can be greatly reassuring.

The Gospel of Mark tells how Jesus restored mental soundness to an insane man, a Gadarene. No sooner did Jesus accomplish this than he crossed by ship to the opposite shore of the Galilean Sea, where he was approached and implored to heal Jairus's daughter, who was at the point of death.

In general usage the word "mind" denotes the matter-based consciousness and source of thought that are believed to belong to every human being and that give him identity. But in Christian Science the word assumes a higher meaning.

Wouldn't we all like to have access to an infinite remedy for evil? An infinite remedy—measureless, limitless, endless! There could be no place where this remedy would not apply; no error could escape its encompassing, correcting power. Indeed an infinite remedy must actually be a preventive, disallowing the presentation or development of error, of sin and illness.

There's no time for weeping over death. There are lessons to learn—lessons of real life and love and dominion over mortality! There is the requirement of Life, God, to find man in Himself, in divine Mind, instead of in frail dust.

Christian Science proves the impossibility of God being man, or man being God, because it declares God's idea to be the expression of His nature. Yet the divine Mind, which creates and supports spiritual ideas, is distinct from the ideas themselves.

The healing practice of Christian Science might be called restoration to oneness. For all our problems come from the belief of separation—our separation from God, infinite good! And their solution comes from the recognition of man as actually spiritual, the infinite, individualized idea of God, eternally embraced in and expressive of His love.

Recently I uncovered some photographs taken many years ago. Scanning them thoughtfully, I asked myself, "Can it be this once was me ?" I remember correcting my grammar to "once was I"; and this "I," this nominal symbol of identity, promptly alerted me to the erroneous trend of my thought.