Article December 18, 1909 Issue

For centuries Christendom has read that often repeated...

Frederick Dixon—London.

Morning Light

For centuries Christendom has read that often repeated saying of Jesus Christ to the woman of Samaria, "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth," and has gone on its way, insisting that God made the material universe, without apparently heeding the confusion to which this leads. It means that Spirit is the father of matter; that divine wisdom has created something that "profiteth nothing"—that the creation of God will one day pass away; and so it ends by admitting unconsciously that matter is temporal after all. Now that which is temporal cannot possibly be eternal, and that which is not eternal cannot logically be described as real. Therefore the Christian Scientist takes his stand on the fact that nothing can be described as real which is not the creation of the divine Mind, and that as this Mind is Spirit, the spiritual alone can be defined as real. This fact that all causation is spiritual is the knowledge of the truth which Jesus Christ said would make men free, and it makes them free by showing them that there is no material law capable of binding them, for the simple reason that the only reality matter has is the supposititious reality with which they themselves endow it, when they mistake it for the creation of Principle.

This being so, the Christian Scientist does not say the age of miracles is departed, on the ground that the miracle was a supernatural interference with the physical laws instituted by God for the government of the world. He says that the miracle is he divinely natural result of the knowledge of the truth which Jesus said would make men free, and that this knowledge of the truth includes a realization of the fact that physical law and material phenomena are the counterfeits of the spiritual law and spiritual universe which are the real and only creation of the divine Mind. The way, consequently, to worship God, who is Spirit, "in spirit and in truth," is to strive to walk in the footsteps of Christ Jesus, and by divorcing, as far as possible, from your consciousness any belief in the reality of matter, to be able to set aside its supposititious laws as Jesus did in the so-called miracles. If these laws had been really God's laws, the miracles would have been not merely supernatural, as supernatural is commonly construed, but superspiritual; for Jesus could no more have reversed an effect of divine causation than omniscience could forget something it already knew.

The miracle was the object-lesson in proof of the truth of the theology of Jesus Christ. Those, he said, who understood the one would be able to perform the other. The healing of the sick, consequently, in Christian Science, becomes something of far vaster significance that the mere overcoming of disease, important as that is. It is the proof which has already brought to hundreds of thousands of sick and sorrowing men and women the assurance that the promises of Christ Jesus are as realizable by the world today as they were by the sick and sorrowing through whose streets he walked well-nigh two thousand years ago.

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