Miscellaneous Articles

Three articles are on this page: “The Seed”, “Moral Sense of Authority” and “Mortal Mind and the Human Mind”.

THE SEED

NEW YORK June 1, 1890

Devoted to the Interests of Christian Science

We trust our readers will overlook the lateness of this issue of THE SEED. A pressure of duties attendant upon the meeting of the National Association in this city is the only reason for the delay.

THE NATIONAL CHRISTIAN SCIENCE ASSOCIATION

The National Christian Science Association after the largest annual convention ever held, has disorganized and adjourned, to meet in three years as a voluntary body of Christian Scientists.

From Mrs. Eddy’s letter to the Association we quote the following, which will declare her reason for advising this progressive step: “Disorganize, and work out individually and alone the sublime ends of human life. I once thought human unity to be strength. I now see that only in unison with divine might is true strength. Apparent union is not always co-operation, but co-elbow.” Co-elbow is a coined word, and most vividly does it express the thought implied: that human unity is the opposite of divine unity. Divine unity is harmonious and impersonal. Human unity is discordant and selfish, ever striving to decide the question: “Who shall be greatest?” When man is left to himself, he is born in the manger in humility, and becomes one with the Father; but when fettered with conventionalism, he is influenced and biased by personal opinions, and the spiritual individuality is obscured.

This higher thought of spiritual freedom, which is the true union, was brought to us by the recent action at the Metaphysical College and again it speaks in language full of meaning. What is implied by this advice of our Teacher to disorganize? Simply, the disbandment of the National Christian Science Association? Indeed, no; but rather the eradication from our thought of all man made laws, while we recognize but the one lawmaker, even God. That which comes to the Association as a body must find an echo in each heart. We must learn to say with Paul: “I was free born,” knowing that the Truth, and the Truth only, makes one free. The call to disorganize, used in its highest application, has been sounded, and must continue to sound, until every visible superstructure of mortal thought has been razed to the ground, until not one stone shall be left standing upon another that shall not be thrown down. To accomplish this glorious work, the impersonal Christ Principle must enter every heart, and alone the sublime ends of human life must be demonstrated. Oneness with the Father is the hope of salvation, and each must work out his own problem, aided, not by human unity, but by the Divine Presence, which ever works with us towards the manifestation of the real and abiding.

Man is a ray of an infinite sun, uncrossed by any other ray, but having his source in the Great Source of all. To individually perceive and demonstrate this is the true unity-the true individuality. Spiritual co-operation is oneness with the Divine Mind, in which we live, move, and have our being. “To the pure all things are pure,” and individually must we prove it, for when one shall have gained the true sense of being, to him all will be seen in their divine relation. To each individual there is but one consciousness in the universe, and this one is his own; and within this consciousness must the problem of life be solved, unaffected by others’ opinions. Guided by the principles of Christian Science, given to us in Science and Health, we are to make manifest our divine individualities. We, who comprehend this wonderful book, have grown to its revelation, and the phenomenon of its appearance is the externalizing of our mentality in its highest call for Truth. Let us take it and study it, for its leaves are for the healing of the nation-the neutralizing of the national thought of material belief, which human unity has evolved. The author of this book is the feminine thought of Love, which, peering into the tombs of carnality, declares that man is not there, but has risen; it is the mother consciousness that begets the child of God.

In this solving of life’s problem, Jesus is our mode-the perspective ideal of ourselves-and we must follow him, walking over the waves of erroneous opinions, stilling the tempest of worldly concurrence, and resurrecting ourselves form the tomb of matter to the conscious realization of our spiritual being. Strength and power come from disorganization, materiality, and re-organization, spiritually. Let us take this counsel of our Teacher’s, not as a human message, but as a command from God, to free ourselves from the fetters of conventionalism. Let us consider it an answer to the demands of the hour. Let us receive it as a mental growth, and consider that its declaration is the divine response to our risen, longing thought; then shall we know the Master consciousness from which it sprung. To be one with the Father, and to “know no man after the flesh,” is to be conscious of the Christ, which declares its eternal presence in the words “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” Let us consider this timely message with understanding, purified and sanctified, and in the three years to come ere we meet again, we may learn to “speak as one having authority,” because we ourselves are convinced of the great truth of being. Thus shall we manifest our divine oneness with our Father, and the things and persons that we now see about us will be cognized as from the Mount of Transfiguration, and seen in the light of Spirit.

TRUE ORGANIZATION

The article of THE SEED of June 1 with regard to the movement of The National Christian Science Association presents to thought the only true and safe basis for action; because, from a scientific point of view, “Strength and power come from disorganization,” or no organization materially, with the consciousness of being spiritually organized through individual union with the one central power and attraction, the Infinite, Divine Mind.

We must remember that organization material, like every other expression of mortal mind, is but a counterfeit of the real unity or oneness of Principle and idea; and as the Truth in the higher understanding is more and more recognized and sought for, the greater will be the manifest effort among mortals to perfect the organizations of humanity in the material realm,-so-called. In proof of this, see the increasing interest in “Nationalism,” and other forms of associated action for regulating the secular affairs of mankind. All these progressive movements indicate increasing light or unfoldment, and must be regarded as steps onward by which the false is proven false, and the truer and better discovered; for the power of Truth is ever pressing on toward a more complete expression of itself, and will to all infinity.

Before reaching the teachings of Christian Science, such a work as the Nationalists are now doing, I regarded with great enthusiasm and hope of speedy relief for suffering humanity, not alone in this our nation and country, but in the world over eventually. During the last decade, great strides have been made in the spread of universality of thought and interest encircling our globe, taking root wherever the soil was ripe for it. But it is the Truth brought to light through Christian Science which has made possible this awakening to the idea of universal brotherhood, now stirring all nations and peoples to an encouraging extent.

All this is but opening up the way for the Science of Being to be recognized, understood and practically lived on a higher plane than ever before manifested by man, because of a closer approximation to the one Divine Consciousness, that we each reflect in our own individual way. Even though “one star differs from another star in glory,” each and all reflect the same ineffable glory, and the whole is required to express Infinity. Unity in the one Mind is omnipotent power, and the human will, merged into the divine will, is the only wisdom. S.B.B.

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MORAL SENSE THE SOURCE OF AUTHORITY

The Christian Science Monitor

Home Forum Page, p. 15

Saturday, January 25, 1919

The old idea that government and liberty are incompatible is no longer valid. The moral sense of humanity repudiates all save government by consent, and in the modern world this moral sense is the source of all authority. It is the living essence of the democratic principle, the aim of which is liberty through government, that is, through agreement and cooperation. Liberty is no longer a reward, no longer a matter of privilege, but a right, to be forfeited only by those who are corrupt and morally injurious to society, and then only as a matter of expediency, not of right. If a man employs his liberty to thwart that of others, then society must use its power of coercion. In the main this is achieved by the deterrent power of public opinion, but it must be admitted that there will always be cases in which physical prevention must be employed, though, as wisdom permeates society, such cases will become fewer, and offenders will be left to face the natural consequences of their actions.

When government was regarded as being inspired by some awful authority from above, then liberty could not be suffered to exist except by dispensation and upon the fulfillment of conditions

The time for that is past. The conception of government has altered. Its authority comes now from the moral sense of the people, that sense by which they are in touch with a power greater than themselves. They do not see their governors as emissaries of a higher power, but as the chosen representatives of the greater power beyond themselves. Inspiration is now no longer in the head of the body politic, but in the whole organism . . . Liberty is a right and all men must have it. He who cheats another man of his liberty loses his own, and so the rich men who have cheated the poor of their liberties have lost theirs. The exploitation brought on by the industrial method has driven liberty out of the political world. Systems? There is only one system. The plutocratic aristocracy cannot maintain liberty as a privilege; democracy can insure liberty as a right. Plutocracy can only destroy liberty in exploiters and exploited alike. Therefore, plutocracy is doomed. Whatever political systems come and go, the ideal of liberty is imperishable, and claims ever the best and bravest and most incorruptible in human energy, which moves ever to one end, the establishment of the divine in man in all those places where men do congregate.-Gilbert Canaan (from “Freedom”).

This is the article I mentioned. Note that it is a Sentinel article which came out simultaneously with Mrs. Eddy’s article she left to be published seven years after her passing, titled “Principle and Practice”. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what C.S.M. articles appeared close to, and shortly following, the September 1, 1917 date, given below, in Footsteps of His Flock? This is the article I send you about 16 months ago which Bliss Knapp had such strong objections to. Paul

MORTAL MIND and HUMAN MIND

Christian Science Sentinel

September 1, 1917

Frederick Dixon

In the effort to grasp the full significance of Christian Science, there is nothing more necessary to keep steadfastly in view than the unreality of mortal mind and all its accompanying phenomena. What exactly Mrs. Eddy meant by mortal mind she has explained, with her usual unrivaled terseness and clarity, in a single line on page 25 of “Retrospection and Introspection,” in the words, “That which sins, suffers, and dies, I named mortal mind,” while on page 9 of “Unity of Good” she makes equally clear the absolute necessity of never being betrayed into any admission, mental or verbal, of the reality of mortal mind, when she asks, “What is the cardinal point of the difference in my metaphysical system?” and immediately answers her own question as follows: “This: that by knowing the unreality of disease, sin, and death, you demonstrate the allness of God. This difference wholly separates my system from all others.”

Mortal mind, then, and human mind are equally and absolutely unreal. They are the illusion which counterfeits God, or Principle, and they possess not one single particle of good, for they are the negation of good. The idea that the human mind is a sort of mortal mind and water, cannot find one line of support in Mrs. Eddy’s writings. Human mind is simply mortal mind expressed humanly. The struggle of the human being for salvation is, consequently, the effort to put off the illusion of the carnal mind, – that is, the mortal mind incarnated or expressed in the flesh, for the word carnal is derived simply from the Latin carnis, meaning flesh, – and to put on the Mind of Christ. Now this divine Mind, or Mind which was in Christ Jesus, is infinite, since God is infinite. Therefore, when the mortal or human mind is put off, and the Mind of Christ or divine Mind is put on, nothing has been changed and nothing has been created, for the divine Mind being infinite has been there all the time. What has seemed to happen is merely that the illusion of the human senses has passed away into its native nothingness. If the human mind had passed into divine Mind, as is sometimes erroneously imagined, evil in some mysterious way would have become good, and so actually eternal.

Precisely the same dilemma of course arises when the effort is made to explain human mind as a not quite so bad mortal mind. The attempt ends inevitably in an endeavor to whitewash mortal Mind. Then this whitewashed mortal mind is gradually diluted until it becomes divine Mind. Thus, instead of the “scientific translation of mortal mind,” described by Mrs. Eddy on pages 115 and 116 of Science and Health, in which the unreality of evil ceases to deceive, so that the reality of good becomes spiritually understood, a sort of crazy genealogical table is set up, to the effect that mortal mind begat human mind, and human mind begat divine Mind, who is called God.

What really occurs is very simple, and is again and again carefully explained by Mrs. Eddy in her writings. The only reality is God, or divine Mind, whose image is man made in the likeness of Mind, and whose reflection is divine idea. The fact that this is so constitutes the only supposititious origin of the lie about or counterfeit of divine Mind which was named by Mrs. Eddy mortal mind, and which, when expressed through the human race, she often termed human mind. But the only power a lie can ever even seem to exert is the temporary sense of power it may seem to possess while those who listen to it are sufficiently ignorant of the truth, the knowledge of which would free them from the bondage of the lie. As, then, a man comes to know more about the truth, the liar or human mind is destroyed, and in proportion to the destruction the truth becomes apparent.

Every atom, then, of human mind that appears to exist is unadulterated mortal mind, and human beings differ from the beasts just in this, that they claim to “be as gods, knowing good and evil.” It is here, indeed, that the lie of mortal mind reaches in humanity the very arrogance of sin, for it claims evil as part of good, and ignorance as the complement of knowledge. It is the very confusion of Babel, a ‘house divided against itself.” Every phase of sin, from the blood-guiltiness of David to the drunkenness of Noah, is exposed in it; every consciousness of limitation, from the riches of Dives to the hunger of Lazarus, is manifested by it; the misery of Rachel, the leprosy of Naaman, and the treachery of Judas, – all these are physical expressions of it. But the moment you find instead the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Samson, and the dutifulness of Shem, the self-surrender of Abraham, the confidence of Daniel, or the insight of Isaiah, you are witnessing what Mrs. Eddy terms, on page 115 of Science and Health, “evil beliefs disappearing,” and the appearing of those traditional qualities which in the ratio of their appearance lead toward the realm of that perfect spiritual understanding of Jesus which constituted his true humanhood, or man appearing. For the putting off of the old man and the putting on of the new means simply the gradual dissolution of the lies of human sense, and the gradual comprehension of the eternal likeness of Principle. This is man appearing.

If there were any truth in the suggestion that the human mind is less evil than the mortal mind, it would logically follow that the human mind could be purged of evil and become divine. Such a theory, however, would make the human mind eternal, and it would prove that the divine Mind was not infinite, since somewhere in infinity room would have to be found for this human mind. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Eddy makes the matter perfectly clear by dismissing the human mind as a myth. “The hosts of Ǽsculapius,” she writes on page 150 of Science and Health, “are flooding the world with diseases, because they are ignorant that the human mind and body are myths.” This proves, finally, that there is no good in human mind, for good is Principle, and it is impossible to destroy one iota of Principle.