The
writer and family are the only students of Christian Science in a small village, and we seldom meet other Scientists, except when business calls us away from home and we can sometimes go to a Christian Science service or a lecture.
Some
months ago it was my great privilege to visit our headquarters in Boston and, upon the invitation of one of the workers, to look over the publishing plant.
Angels
of thought in their heavenward flightBore on their pinions this prayer one night,Woven with love in the silent loom,Fragrant with faith through the seeming gloom:I thank Thee, Lord, for knowing,For courage to declare,Thought all to sense is darkness,The light of Truth is there.
It is just as well to remember that the spread of Christian Science from the day, some forty years ago, when there was one Christian Scientist in the world, a delicate and lonely woman without material resources of any kind in an obscure American village, to this day, when it is able to count its hundreds of churches and its hundreds of thousands of adherents in all parts of the world, is a thing unparalleled in history.
Christian Science does not teach that mortal man has no body, as our critic seems to think it does, but rather that the material body which decays and dies is not the real man which the Bible says is made in God's likeness.
Christian Science is certainly "founded upon a truth," for its only foundation is the Bible and the teachings of Jesus and his apostles, which were absolutely scientific in that they were demonstrable.
The first of the religious tenets of Christian Science is in these words: "As adherents of Truth, we take the inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life".
Beginning with September, the post office department, as a measure of economy, is shipping all magazines to central distributing points by fast freight, instead of by the regular fast mail trains.
It
is a fair inference, to judge from the many letters received at headquarters which request information as to the right way to carry on the work of the Sunday school, that the subject is one of great interest, and that there is not only an intention upon the part of those who are most intimately connected with and responsible for the conduct of this work for the good of the children who are attending these schools in the branch churches, to put into it their best efforts, but a general desire that these efforts shall be rightly directed.
Few
would question that the safety and welfare of the communal life is determined by the ethical status of the people, the reverence shown for a moral order.
With the hope that some one who is coming into Christian Science in the midst of seeming opposition may be encouraged therby, I offer the following testimony.
It is four years ago that I first read "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" and found, at last, an answer to the question I had been hopelessly asking for years: What are we?
As I awoke one morning recently a song of gratitude was singing itself in my healing in my heart for my healing in Christian ancestry made good soil for the Universalist teaching that God is love, and for the added truth of Christian Science to take root.
I was reared in an orthodox faith in which I believed implicitly, and dearly loved the church even after I found that some of the clergy were not infallible and sometimes fell into grievous errors.