Description
There are four addresses in this volume: God, The Synonyms for God, Man’s Relationship to God; Substance, Supply, Space, and Salvation; Body; The Four Rivers.
Helen Spangler is especially clear on how to demonstrate supply for our needs by seeking them first in our innermost thoughts. She shows how our inner self can be permeated with spiritual understanding.
On reading her addresses, it is obvious that she writes from understanding and not from theory.
That she was an outstanding teacher is obvious from reading her addresses. A friend first gave her Science and Health, and it has been said that once she opened this book she never put it down. She had Christian Science class instruction from George Shaw Cook, and was a practitioner and teacher in Los Angeles, California, from the 1930’s until 1964. She had many articles published in the Christian Science periodicals. She did extraordinary healing work. Before she left us, she said she had seen everything healed but leprosy. Soon after that a leper came to be healed, and she healed him.
The four addresses in this book rate among the most advanced works on Christian Science to come to us from the past. Mrs. Spangler writes on such subjects as the subjective nature of being, body, and space, and she writes from understanding, rather than from theory. Her style is so clear and direct that it illumines thought with ideas that transform how we see ourselves and our world. Quoted here are selections from her addresses that focus on the subjective nature of being as revealed in Christian Science.
This excerpt from an address shows the illuminating thoughts she gives us on the subjective nature of all things: “We speak of divine consciousness. Just what does that mean? It could only mean the consciousness of the divine Mind — oneness with God. This is the ever-living God, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. This enables us to see how Jesus accomplished his mighty works. His life was a constant subjective experience; that is, his conscious knowing of his oneness with God made his experience — whether the need was to heal the sick, feed the five thousand, raise the dead, or produce the tax-money from the fish’s mouth. All things were subject to the divinity of his being. It was all within himself — true subjectivity. . ..
Ideas do not exist objectively in what is called space, but they exist subjectively in what is known as consciousness, and man possesses these ideas by reflection. Because the whole creation exists subjectively in the Creator, the Creator consciously guides, governs, protects, preserves, and sustains every existing thing (thought). Everything lives, moves, and has its being in Him subjectively. No existing thing ever began and no existing thing will ever end. Everything God created must express eternality, infinity, all the qualities of God. No so-called destructive beliefs can be in divine consciousness; therefore, beliefs are unreal and unknown, for infinite Mind is all-knowing.”
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We know very little about Mrs. Spangler, but her addresses are so inspiring that she must have been considered an outstanding teacher during the period when Christian Science churches were overflowing, and each year teachers had a full class of thirty pupils. She taught and practiced in Los Angeles, California, from the 1930’s until her passing in 1964. She contributed many articles to the periodicals, beginning with one in the Christian Science Sentinel of March 27, 1937. Only a few of her association addresses have come to light, but they are enough to illustrate the teaching that took place during this period in the Church. Mrs. Spangler now joins the list of those dedicated workers whose early writings are destined to educate the “simple seekers for truth” found in every age.