Article December 31, 1910 Issue

REVELATION AND PRESERVATION

(A paper recently read at a business meeting of a Christian Science church.)

In The Christian Science Journal for January, 1901, is an article written for a newspaper by our Leader on what the last Thanksgiving day in the nineteenth century should signify to all mankind. She said it signified, among other things, "that revelation, spiritual voice, and vision are less subordinate to material sight and sound and more apparent to reason." This was said a decade ago, and we may be sure that these spiritual phenomena appear more reasonable now than then. Public opinion has at least advanced them from the inexplicable to the mysterious; but still regards them as abnormal if not supernatural. Christian Scientists have advanced beyond this point, but it has been observed that many of them need a clearer view of revelation, especially the revelation of Christian Science.

What then is revelation? It may be defined as the passing of true thought from divine Mind to human consciousness; and in Science the passing of thought from God to man is the normal and incessant action of Mind; the receiving of such thought is the natural and necessary function of man. According to what Mrs. Eddy has written on pages 76 and 276 of Science and Health, man is "an individual consciousness," "cognizant only of the things of God."

From these definitions it follows that the discovery of Christian Science was a perfectly natural occurrence; it came to pass in accordance with the normal operation of divine law. Mrs. Eddy had become accustomed to ponder the larger problems of human life. She had grown in the love for God and neighbor until her desire and aspiration were to save the human race from its bondage to false belief. She had turned away from matter to Spirit with an unusual degree of understanding; her condition of thought had become so purified that she was prepared to receive, not merely a passing glimpse or transient vision, but an abiding understanding, of divine reality. Thus prepared, the action of divine law gradually unfolded to her consciousness the Principle of the universe and the relation of all things to the one cause—the true nature of God and His universe, including man. Incidentally the understanding thus gained enabled her to solve the problem presented by the apparent coexistence of evil with the infinitude of good, and to discover the mental modus or practice by which the belief in evil may be overcome.

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