Christian Science Lecturer On Laws Of The Bible’

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31027, 5 April 1966, Page 13

Christian Science Lecturer On Laws Of The Bible’

“Christianity sets forth facts that can be proved,” said Miss N. Poling, in a lecture in Christchurch yesteray. “The Bible contains the law that produces and governs all existence,” she said. “It concerns how you think, how you live, and what becomes of you.” When understood, “it changes the course of human experience.” Miss Poling is a member of the Christian Science Board of Lectureship. “Actually," Miss Poling said, “we are all soldiers in the great army of God, dedicated to fight for human freedom, the individuality of man, and God’s reign of peace.” And the Bible “gives the rules.”

Men had long recognised the fundamentals of good in those rules. “But what is needed is how to practice them,” she said. Human problems remained unsolved “because we haven’t yet obeyed the first commandment, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’”

“From beginning to end,” she said, “the Bible is declaring that there is but one law, one power operating in the universe,” and that ‘“man is inseparable from this power.” But to “bring ourselves into accord with this power,” we must “understand the nature of it, and of ourselves.” Jesus gave the answer, she said. “He showed us how to obey divine law.” He “told us: ‘God is a Spirit: and they that

worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.” To obey this command people must “forsake matter for spirit,” the lecturer said. “The struggle of the world today in its race for survival should be enough to arouse everyone from the dream of materiality . . . It’s time we recognised that we are mental beings living in a world of thought,” she said.

“Each one of us,” she said, “is in reality a spiritual idea in the mind that is God.” “You are necessary to God as His expression. Your individuality is necessary to express the divine completeness.

“To comprehend your true worth, and to let your true selfhood begin to appear here and now, you must understand the principle of your being, God. You must understand your indestructible relationship to God.” “The first step is to pray,” Miss Poling said. “Prayer is simple and natural” in Christian Science. “It is bringing one’s thinking into accord with sipiritual law—the spiritual facts of God and man. It includes recognising and acknowledging the presence and perfection of God and His ideas, and expressing gratitude to God for His Christ, the ever-pre-sent Truth.” That means “giving up all reservations that would keep you from seeing that you exist as a perfect idea in God.” It included a childlike ac-

ceptance of “basic spiritual facts”—that “Love is the most powerful force in the universe;” that “God, the creative Principle, is Love;” that God’s love blesses everyone just as the sun shines on all alike;” that “we must reflect love just as the rays of the sun reflect light;” and that there is a “fundamental law of being, the law of Love, operating all the time,” Such prayer also involves “discipline,” she said. “Laws can’t protect us unless we obey them.” Once recognised and acted upon, God’s law “will operate in human affairs to produce mental and spiritual health and give men dominion over all the earth.”

She quoted this description by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science: “The law of God is the law of spirit, a moral and spiritual force of immortal and divine mind.”

This law “is vital to each one of us,” Miss Poling said. It "reaches us right where we are when we’re willing to learn it and obey it. “Those studying Christian Science,” she said, “find that as we obey this law, it heals us of everything unlike God —fear, envy, hatred revenge, irritation, unhappiness, sickness.” Man Healed ■ The lecturer told of how one man was healed of a supposedly fatal heart condition when he awoke to “the law of Love,” and allowed it to govern his thinking toward a person he had once despised. A Christian Science practitioner had told him: “God, who is all powerful, created you perfect and is able to keep you that way—but you have to obey His will. As God loves you, you have to loye other men.” The man responded, and was “permanently healed.” It was this same power that appeared in the works of Christ Jesus, the lecturer said. Jesus illustrated “the impartial nature of the law of God, of God’s will operating in behalf of everyone, everywhere, all the time.” All evils “yielded to his understanding of harmony and completeness.”

“The Truth he taught and proved is still with us,” she said. “It is God’s message to us waiting our ability and willingness to receive it. . . . We must obey God as he did.”