Article August 21, 1909 Issue

Starting from the premises, disclosed by Scripture and...

W. J. Bonnin

Birkdale and Southport (Eng.) Pioneer.

Starting from the premises, disclosed by Scripture and conceded by Christians generally, that God is good, that He is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, that He is Life and Truth and Love, Christian Science establishes its position and proves its teaching by the infallible process of deduction. The truths thus established may not agree with what our physical senses would have us believe to be the truths of God's creation, but to exhibit and expose this disagreement and to demonstrate that what is not in accord with eternal divine Truth cannot itself be true, eternal, and real, is the mission of Christian Science. Naturally, to an age well-nigh submerged in materialism, this teaching comes with almost as great a shock as it produced when it was first propounded nineteen centuries ago. He who preached, "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing," declared in those words the fundamental truth of his teaching, the scientific definition of reality.

Humanity has through the ages been educated to accept the testimony of the senses as indisputable evidence of truth. Christian Science comes to teach mankind that in proportion as spiritual understanding is unfolded, so will this sense testimony be discarded as evidence only of what is temporal, destructible, and supposititious. The cry of the psalmist for understanding, the prayer of Solomon for wisdom, the Pauline advice to let that Mind be in us "which was also in Christ Jesus,"—what do they all stand for? Do they not signify that man, the child of God, has a capacity for a higher form of understanding than merely human knowledge? Do they not indicate that this spiritual knowledge is the knowledge requisite to comprehend God's truth? "If any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know," wrote Paul. The study of Christian Science fosters and develops this understanding, and as its students progress in it they begin to see how man, created in God's image and likeness, and given dominion over all the earth, is in his true self able to rise above material limitations, how sin and misery and sickness have no power beyond what they have by erring mortal beliefs been invested with, and how mankind is not rightfully harassed by them.

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