Editorial June 27, 1908 Issue

ADVANCING STEPS

Archibald McLellan

If there be a few Christian Scientists who feel they have lost something through the recent changes in the By-laws of The Mother Church, they will be greatly helped in their efforts to adjust themselves to the new conditions thus created, by a calm survey of the progressive steps which have been taken in the past under the leadership of Mrs. Eddy. They will see that these latest changes have had worthy predecessors in our journey "from sense to Soul, from a material sense of existence to the spiritual" (Sci ence and Health, p. 566), and that as each seemingly radical change has heretofore worked well for our Cause and for humanity, even so we shall come to recognize in this but another proof of her far-seeing wisdom.

Formula and formality have ever seemed necessary in the early days of every great reform movement, but no movement has attained its true usefulness until many of these concessions to human belief have been outgrown and shaken off. That such concessions have been made in the practice of Christian Science is not be wondered at, nor should we be disturbed because we have outgrown only a part of the beliefs of mind in matter which have called for them.

Every thoughtful Christian Scientist knows that the true Communion of The Church of Christ, Scientist, is not in form or ceremony, but in the silent prayer which heals the sick, reforms the sinful, and binds up the brokenhearted; and while the public Communion in The Mother Church has been of distinct value in the past, as one of those "stepping-stones," as Tennyson tells us, on which men may rise "to higher things," the members of the Church have felt sure that, like other ceremonial forms, it would in time be given up.

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