Editorial October 4, 1913 Issue

A Dual Mission

Archibald McLellan

By far the greater part of the unnecessary opposition which attends the demonstration of the healing truth discovered by Mrs. Eddy, is induced by Ignorance, or rather a mistaken sense of the mission of Christian Science to mankind,—a failure to apprehend that its ministry is twofold, in that its healing of the sick is the natural concomitant of the overcoming or casting out of the false belief of which the sickness was the tangible manifestation; that it is a new-old religion, so radical in its reliance upon the divine all-power, so wide reaching in its results, that in scarcely more than three decades its churches have girdled the world.

Nor is this opposition surprising in view of the fact that it is through its healing works that Christian Science makes its strongest appeal to suffering humanity. Mrs. Eddy might have expounded the great truth she had discovered, and have won adherents; but if this had been all, Christian Science would today be classed with the hundred other variants of the Christian religion that have their little day and then make way for others just as ephemeral. But the great fact that differentiates Christian Science is the proofs of its verity as the teaching of the Master in the "signs" which he declared should attend the preaching of the gospel by his true followers,—"them that believe,"—in the multitudes who have been healed from sickness and redeemed from sin either by their own study and application of the teachings of its textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," or through the clearer understanding of its divine Principle, God Himself, by one who has been longer in the way.

The great Master came among men, and preached the gospel of the kingdom in all its purity and blessedness. And when his admonitions fell on unheeding ears, then, with a heart overflowing in compassionate yearning for those so markedly in need of the gospel of salvation, the great Teacher began that ministry to the sick and the sinning which proved the verity of his claim as no mere assertions could have done.

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