Man Is Tributary to Divine Mind
This week’s Bible Lesson, “Is the Universe, Including Man, Evolved by Atomic Force?”, includes the following except from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy:
“Mind, supreme over all its formations and governing them all, is the central sun of its own systems of ideas, the life and light of all its own vast creation; and man is tributary to divine Mind.” (p. 209:5-8; emphasis mine)
Mrs. Eddy confirms this when she writes again that “Man is tributary to God, Spirit, and to nothing else.” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 481:2–3)
What does it mean for man to be tributary to God? Perhaps the following excerpts may make it clearer.
According to the Websters 1828 dictionary, “tributary” is an adjective from the word tribute, meaning:
“Paying tribute to another, either from compulsion, as an acknowledgment of submission, or to secure protection, or for the purpose of purchasing peace. The republic of Ragusa is tributary to the grand seignor. Many of the powers of Europe are tributary to the Barbary states.
Subject; subordinate.”
Elizabeth Earl Jones writes in her Sentinel article “Blessed Are They That Mourn” the following:
“As the rivers are tributary to the ocean, flowing from near and far to empty all their activities into the great mother of waters, which in turn sends back the waters, purified and rarefied, through the heavens, replenishing and renewing the rivers with showers of abundance and refreshment, so also are we tributary to God, Spirit; not to matter, to self, or to mortal man.” (February 27, 1909 issue)
And from Miscellaneous Writings:
“‘If this heart, humble and trustful, faithfully asks divine Love to feed it with the bread of heaven, health, holiness, it will be conformed to a fitness to receive the answer to its desire; then will flow into it the ‘river of His pleasure,’ the tributary of divine Love, and great growth in Christian Science will follow, — even that joy which finds one’s own in another’s good.’ (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 127.)” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 18:10)
“Like a river that runs to the ocean,
Like a ray reaching out from the sun,
Like a branch and the tree, a drop and the sea,
I and my Father are one.”
(Christian Science Hymnal, No. 524:1)
Kenneth Foster, CS
