Article December 4, 1909 Issue

Jesus did not buy the pardon of the world with his life,...

Frederick Dixon

Beverley (Eng.) Recorder

Jesus did not buy the pardon of the world with his life, and so save the individual sinner from making his own atonement to divine Love; that is to say, from demonstrating his spiritual oneness with the Father, as a child of God. What he really did do, as Mrs. Eddy has so clearly explained, in her noble chapter on Atonement and Eucharist, was to become the Wayshower to humanity, not by doing its work for it, but by showing it how to do its own; and so, as the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews says, in the passage quoted by the canon, "for by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." This does not in the least mean that we are exempted from making every sacrifice which is necessary to overcome our belief in evil, and so, as has been said, demonstrate our spiritual unity with our divine Father. It is necessary for us to go on making sacrifice after sacrifice of our own material beliefs, in our effort to gain the goal of our hopes, the Mind that was in Christ Jesus; and so as Mrs. Eddy has written, in the passage on page 23 of Science and Health which the canon has cut out of its context, "one sacrifice, however great, is insufficient to pay the debt of sin. The atonement requires constant self-immolation on the sinner's part."

It is the effort to bring this about which constitutes the healing mission of Christian Science. People often talk as if Christian Science was a sort of mammoth dispensary. It is nothing of the sort, unless by a mammoth dispensary is meant a religion through the understanding of which sin may be vanquished, sorrow turned into joy, and the sick made whole. These things are all inseparable the one from the other, and that is why Christ Jesus was able to demand from the scribes, by the bed of the man sick of the palsy, at Nazareth, "Whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk?"

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