Article November 11, 1922 Issue

Should your readers desire to know what Christian Science...

William Capell, Committee on Publication for the State of Connecticut,

Norwich Bulletin

Should your readers desire to know what Christian Science actually teaches regarding Jesus' atonement, may I suggest that they read the second chapter of the Christian Science textbook, entitled Atonement and Eucharist. I will quote, however, one of the Christian Science tenets as found on page 497 of this book: "We acknowledge Jesus' atonement as the evidence of divine, efficacious Love, unfolding man's unity with God through Christ Jesus the Way-shower; and we acknowledge that man is saved through Christ, through Truth, Life, and Love as demonstrated by the Galilean Prophet in healing the sick and overcoming sin and death." In that wonderful prayer recorded in the seventeenth chapter of John, Jesus, referring to his disciples and those who should believe in him, prayed: "That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us." Jesus labored, suffered, and sacrificed in order that mankind might understand as he did the Science of true being, and thus be able to demonstrate man's eternal at-one-ment with God.

Christian Science makes an important distinction between man, the spiritual image and likeness of God, and a sick and sinful mortal, who often seems to be the wellnigh helpless victim of disease and death. Christian Science does not claim that a mortal man is immortal. Such a claim would be absurd. Christian Science teaches that the real man, the son of God, is immortal. Jesus understood what man really is. And when he said, "Before Abraham was, I am," he was referring to his real, spiritual, eternal selfhood. John, in speaking of Christ Jesus, said, "As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God." That is, those who really understood the divine Science which Jesus taught and demonstrated were able to perceive the nature of the real man. Paul was referring to the real man when he said in his letter to the Ephesians, "Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."

In Christian Science, the word "real" is applied only to God and to His creation. If God did not create sickness and death, then sickness and death are not real. Now, of course, this is not saying that sickness and death do not seem to mortals to be realities. And it is only as mortals put off the false beliefs of mortality and understand the truth about immortality that they enter the kingdom of God, the realm of the absolutely real, where, as we read in Revelation, "There shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away."

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