From Mary Baker Eddy, Her Spiritual Precepts, by Gilbert Carpenter:
When one eats from the standpoint that what he has eaten is a product of earth and was raised by man’s patience and skill, he loses sight of the fact that every good gift and every perfect gift cometh down from the Father of lights. The food may appear to come from beneath, but in reality it comes from above. When Jesus fed the five thousand, he demonstrated that the earth never created food. Just as the ventriloquist’s dummy is used to deceive people into thinking that it is the source of the former’s voice, so mortal mind uses the land and sea to deceive mortals into believing that these are the sources of bread and fish.
The food that we eat every day is manna from heaven as truly as was the food that sustained the Children of Israel in the wilderness. The fact that they picked it up off the ground, whereas we grow ours from seed, does not alter the fact that all food comes from Mind.
Mrs. Eddy’s message was manna from heaven that carried the spirit of healing; but because it was appropriated by mortal thought, it appeared to come from the ground of a trained mortal intelligence, and so carried scant spiritual uplift or healing. Even though Mrs. Eddy made the demonstration to receive it from heaven, the good was almost lost because it was appropriated by mortal mind.
The food that sustained the Children of Israel came down from heaven. In Deuteronomy 8 we find a warning that in the process of time the temptation would come to believe that food came as the result of mortal man’s skill and intelligence, rather than the demonstration of God’s giving. So it becomes necessary to state that it is not material food that sustains man’s life, but the thought back of it, the Mind of God that accompanies it. It is the task of the student of Christian Science to learn to receive the Spirit of God through every human channel, since only in that way will he become a perpetual recipient of God’s constant blessings, which bring to man all that he needs to sustain him.
The Children of Israel admitted that the food they gathered and called manna, was a vehicle which carried the Mind of God. Today we must extend this admission to cover everything.