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1933 association address
In his outstanding address, The End of the World, he tells how the present chemicalization signifies the end of the material world, with the breaking up of the materialistic forms of government, economics, business, and religion, in order to make way for the “new heavens and new earth” being brought to light by Christian Science. He writes, “It has long been a settled conclusion that the world we now live in will sometime be done away with, but the destruction of a material planet is plainly not what Jesus meant by the ‘end of the world,’ but rather the end of the material ages, or the old making way for the new. The prophets looked forward to, and in their spiritual vision saw, the coming of a better view of God’s creation — or the new heaven and earth and man.
“When Jesus said, ‘In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world’; and when Mrs. Eddy writes in the textbook, ‘The powers of this world will fight,’ they were not referring to a material planet, or to anything which God created, but to ‘the world of error’; or to that general system of things which rests upon so-called physical laws and phenomena. In other words, it is what we could define in Christian Science as the world of material thinking.
“The dominant factor in this world of materiality is physical sensation, as comprised in the five bodily senses, through which or by which mortals receive their impressions, and upon whose evidence is based the teachings of the schools. This world of sensation has ever been the battleground whereon evil seeks to overcome mankind, and to hold them captive in a bondage which is immeasurably greater than that of the Israelites in Egypt. It is this world which is in such general commotion and distress, chafing to be freed from its bonds, not knowing where to look for deliverance, and which the Bible says is to come to an end. Speaking of the conditions through which the nations have been passing, and of the signs which are to precede the end of the world as we now know it, Jesus said: ‘So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors.’