Article August 5, 1911 Issue

Christian Science is the attempt to restore the teaching...

Frederick Dixon—Dublin, Ireland.

Pioneer

Christian Science is the attempt to restore the teaching of primitive Christianity to the world, in a form adapted to the requirements of modern conditions. There is in certain religious quarters a tendency to regard the Old Testament as a quantité négligeable, and to base all modern religious teaching on the New Testament. Such a view is structurally impossible and historically incomplete. The New Testament grew out of the teaching of the Old as completely as Christian Science has grown out of the teaching of the New. The Bible, as we have it today, may be described as the story of the gradual evolution of the spiritual idea in the human consciousness. This spiritual idea is the Christ, and the Bible records the effort of the human race to gain a perception of the Christ, to hold that perception, and to demonstrate the meaning of it. Jesus referred to this, in a famous sentence, when he said to the Jews, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad." He did not, of course, mean to imply that Abraham had ever seen the physical Jesus, but he did mean to say that Abraham grasped the Christ, the truth about God, sufficiently to realize the eventual victory of the Christ when a knowledge of it was sufficiently gained to be developed and manifested in human form, as it was in Jesus the Christ.

Exactly in the same way, the book of Isaiah contains the Messianic prophecies. The word prophet referred originally to the priest who explained the oracles. He was the man who understood and gave utterance to a clearer sense of Truth than the world about him. The Hebrew prophets were seers in exactly this sense. Their vision of the Christ, or their understanding of Truth, was sufficient to enable them to foretell the inevitable effect of the struggle between truth and error. In this way, the writer of the Messianic prophecies was able to point the world to the conditions which must inevitably occur when there should arise in its midst a man so dominated by Principle as to manifest the working of Principle scientifically in his daily life. To the Jewish nation, wrapped, like the people about them, in materialism, the Messiah inevitably took the form of an earthly potentate, a form which the folklore of the world has disseminated in the myths of the sun god and in romances such as the Arthurian legends. To those, however, in its midst who had sufficiently divorced materiality from their thoughts, there was always present a more spiritual conception of the Christ, a conception which enabled them to rise superior to the evidence of the physical senses, seeing, with more or less persistency, "the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof."

This understanding of Principle, this vision of the Christ, which Jesus was one day to define as the knowledge of the truth which would make the world free, came with more or less persistency to the Hebrew nation from the time when Abraham the historical father of that nation broke away from the polytheism of Babylon in his marvelous perception of monotheism. Then came the day of Moses, who, with a broadening perception of the Christ, held before the people in the desert the dominating power of Truth, feeding them with manna and healing them through the type of the uplifted serpent.

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