Article August 4, 1917 Issue

The Christian Science text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures"...

Duncan Sinclair

Partick (Scotland) Gazette

The Christian Science text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy, is used by Christian Scientists as a commentary on the Bible. Many of them were led to the study of Science and Health after having failed to get relief through material remedies from sickness which in certain cases had afflicted them for long periods of time; and many have been healed of bodily troubles, as well as of defects of character, through reading this book understandingly. While they have been studying it they have found the Bible becoming more and more an open book to them, and a mine of spiritual knowledge. In fact, Mrs. Eddy's discovery of Christian Science and her subsequent elucidation of the divine Principle which heals, were due to her devoted study of the Bible. This she acknowledges on page 110 of Science and Health, where she says, "The Bible was my only text-book."

Christian Science is concerned with Life and Life's activities, and with the destruction of the belief in death entertained by mortals. It was Paul who declared to the Corinthian church, "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." Now in Christian Science every deduction which is made is logically drawn from the absolute truth about God. God is infinite Life. In infinite Life there cannot possibly exist that which claims to be the very opposite of Life, what mortals call death. Christian Science holds that reality alone originates in God and is sustained by spiritual law, and that reality must in consequence alone possess the qualities of the divine nature. Evil, disease, and death are unreal because they have no divine cause, God being infinite good. Christian Science therefore declares them to be false beliefs of mortal mind, of the "carnal mind," which Paul said "is enmity against God." It is these errors of belief which perish, or which truth destroys. Christ Jesus healed, through his spiritual understanding of truth or reality, all manner of sickness and sin, and raised into active life again those who had fallen into the deep sleep of death. He knew that every phase of evil was a lie against the truth, against the spiritual fact of the omnipresence of God, good.

The word devil stands for the personified sense of evil. It was among many names used by Eastern peoples to typify evil, the lie against good; and Jesus very definitely emphasized its false nature when he said to the boastful Jews of his day: "Ye are of your father the devil ... He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he seapketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it." The false sense of things alone can perish; and this false sense of things is the carnal, material, or sensuous mentality frequently designated by the word soul in the Bible, in contradistinction to spiritual sense, which is the spiritual understanding of the omnipresence and omnipotence of good.

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