Article December 2, 1905 Issue

What The Mother Church Means to the World

SAMUEL GREENWOOD.

Mrs. Eddy's discovery in 1866, through her own personal experience, of the existence of a divine Science of healing, marked the birth-hour of Christian Science, a remarkable and unparalleled religious movement which, devoid of sensationalism and without blare of trumpet or aggressive propaganda, has literally encircled the earth. (See Science and Health, pp. 107, 108.) The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Mass., known as The Mother Church of Christian Science, is the outcome of Mrs. Eddy's discovery, and represents the great Cause which she has founded and which she so wisely and lovingly directs.

The organization and subsequent prosperity of this Church have a significance for the whole world such as attaches to no other in ecclesiastical history. In the twenty-six years of its existence it has reached a membership of over thirty-six thousand, a fact which should command wide and thoughtful interest when it is realized that this membership has been largely gathered from the ranks of the sick and dying, from the victims of impure and sinful habits, from the heart-broken and the world-weary, the agnostic and infidel, who have been healed and reformed by Christian Science, and who have found through its teaching a God they can understand and love. No other religious organization since apostolic days has increased its numbers to such proportions and maintained its prosperity by such works as these, so that one might well consider what may be the ultimate influence on human destiny of Christian Science when it becomes better understood.

The Mother Church is the symbol and the prophecy of human freedom from all that now enslaves mind and body, a freedom which Christian Science proclaims to the world and which must be realized ere Christ's kingdom can fully come on earth. This country was agitated to its farthest borders when President Lincoln proclaimed the emancipation of the African slave in America; but how much greater concern would move the whole world could it awaken at once to the full import of the Christian Science movement, and to the knowledge that the realization of its ideal is not a dream but an actual and present possibility. Noble though Lincoln's proclamation was, it embraced only the legal liberty of a limited number of unfortunates, while that of Christian Science includes the liberty of the entire race from its slavery to the material senses, and from all the dire miseries that result therefrom. The enslavement of the negro was but a feeble illustration of the bondage of mortals to their belief in matter, a belief that includes all the evil and the suffering of earth. Our Leader says that the emancipation of the African slave was "only prophetic of further steps towards the banishment of a more wide-spread slavery, found on higher planes of existence, and under more subtle and depressing forms" (Science and Health, p.226).

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