Article April 3, 1909 Issue

Mrs. Eddy has stated that the Bible was her only textbook,...

Capt. Geoffrey Wilkinson

Onlooker

Mrs. Eddy has stated that the Bible was her only textbook, and any one who has gained even a slight demonstrable understanding of Christian Science has no reason to doubt her statement, for he can see how absolutely her teaching has been drawn from it. The fact is, that if you start with the Scriptural teaching that God is All, that God is good, and that God is Spirit or Mind, the rest of Mrs. Eddy's teaching follows as a matter of course, if you will only be logical, and do not, as others have done, throw logic to the winds when faced with the testimony of the physical senses. The essential point which has differentiated Mrs. Eddy from every great teacher since the days of the Galilean Prophet is the intense spiritual discernment which has enabled her to see and demonstrate the unreality of evil in its many forms, thereby breaking away from that mesmerism of sense which has lain like a pall on Christendom for eighteen centuries. The healing of Christian Science follows naturally from the understanding of the truth of being, before which the errors of sense flee as darkness before the light, for truth is of God and has the divine energy behind it, and where truth appears, error disappears—forever. Once let the student of mathematics grasp the fact that four times four are sixteen, and he can no longer be led astray by the supposition that they are twenty, or even thirty-two. Such is the nature of absolute truth.

The critic seems to have ignored the fact that "the mystical and ascetic elements in Christian Science" are not only the natural conclusions from Mrs. Eddy's premise of the allness of God, Spirit, good, but also the commonplaces of primitive Christian doctrine. Should any one doubt this, let him familiarize himself with the teachings of the New Testament, and realize that these teachings were meant to be practised, not to be regarded as too transcendental for imitation by ordinary mortals. In the same way Mrs. Eddy's teachings as to the overcoming of death and on certain social questions are not only the logical conclusions from her premise, but identical with the teachings of the New Testament. Thus, when our critic wrote that Christian Science "has a much longer pedigree than recent writers seem to have realized," he was saying a good deal more than he intended. The fact is, that Christian Science is the outcome of Mrs. Eddy's continuous and devoted study of the Bible as illumined by the singular spirituality of her thought, and her teaching has succeeded in making of the Bible the most interesting and practical book in the world.

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