Article September 9, 1911 Issue

THE CORRELATIVE SCRIPTURE

WILTON H. MC KERRAL.

In the passages of Scripture from the third chapter of the first epistle of John selected by our Leader to be read at the Sunday services as correlative to the "scientific statement of being" from the Christian Science text-book (p. 468), the personal pronoun in the first person plural occurs eight times. It is evident, therefore, that the antecedent of this pronoun must be a quite important factor in these passages. For what then does the word stand? Is this "we" or "us" personal, meaning only the writer and certain others to whom the lines are addressed? Or is it sectarian, and intended to include only the adherents of a certain religious belief? Or is it universal, representing humanity?

These passages in their correlation to the "scientific statement of being" should therefore furnish us the key to their interpretation. The conclusion of the "scientific statement of being" reads, "Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual" (Science and Health, p. 468). The whole purpose of this statement is the declaration of man's spiritual nature; of his sonship with God. The theme of the correlative Scripture is, in this case, identical; and the antecedent of its personal pronoun we may fairly assume to be none other than the "man" of the scientific statement of being. These selections are neither of them in any way sectarian. Both are in the broadest sense universal.

The constant recurrence of this pronoun in the Scripture reading has a tendency to lead one to place upon it an emphasis which may cause the listener unfamiliar with Christian Science to suppose that it is intended to use the word in a sectarian sense. The justification of this inference lies in the law that emphasis tends to narrow the meaning of the word emphasized and cause it to pass from its general to its more specific signification; indeed it is questionable if the pronoun at any time requires special emphasis to bring out the full meaning of these passages. If in the first clause thought is especially directed to "us" as the recipients of God's love, the tendency is for the emphasis on this word to repeat itself throughout the reading, so that the appreciation of the sequence of thought is somewhat disturbed by the recurring intrustion of the idea of personality.

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