Article December 31, 1904 Issue

The Christian Science Text-book

SAMUEL GREENWOOD.

To form an approximately just estimate of the text-book of Christian Science, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker G. Eddy, one should consider the need it is intended to meet, and the success it is achieving in its own field. To read it merely for a confirmation of prejudice or preformed disagreement is a mental blindness that cannot discern its real beauty and utility. Assuming to criticise what we do not understand is bald ignorance; to condemn what conflicts with our own beliefs is egotism; to ridicule or abuse what is intended to bless and save is inexcusably unkind and un-Christian. Science and Health has survived unscathed the onslaughts of its critics, and rests secure in the gratitude and affection of its beneficiaries.

The increasing demand for this book indicates that it is satisfying the want that called for it; namely, the hunger of mankind for a more reasonable and tangible knowledge of God, and how to work out their salvation, than has been afforded by other systems of theology and healing. This fact should engage the earnest attention of those who are working or praying for the betterment of human conditions. It has outlived the prophecy of its earlier critics, that it would never be read, for its readers are now numbered by the hundred thousands, while it has been welcomed in all the leading libraries of the world. While its depth of spiritual thought and its comprehensive treatment of the problems of being have puzzled materialistic philosophers, the simplicity of children has grasped its meaning without effort, enabling them to demonstrate its statements fearlessly and successfully.

Most religious teachers and advanced thinkers have admitted that there is too much materialism in human thought, but they have not defined the limits within which men may safely and profitably believe in matter and obey its supposed laws. Mrs. Eddy alone had the courage to settle the question by declaring against matter entirely, either as creator or creation, entity or power; for she alone had reached that clearness of spiritual perception that could discern man and the universe as in and of Spirit, God, only; and hence spiritual only, in nature and substance. Nothing more at variance with human wisdom or the beliefs of mortals could be conceived of than this. That such would utimately be the truth of being, when matter and mortality had passed away was the general religious belief; but that it was or could be the reality of man now, for time as well as eternity, on earth as well as in heaven, had been declared only by the great Teacher. None but the purest of natures could have reached the discovery and demonstration of this Science of spiritual being,—and none but the highest moral heroism could have faced the utter materialism of the nineteenth century with a message which, if true, meant the passing of the cherished traditions of ages and the abandonment of the materialistic dogmas that had ruled the race since Adam. History furnishes us with nothing outside the life of Jesus Christ more sublime than this.

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