Article November 2, 1918 Issue

One vital difference, the difference between matter and...

The Christian Science Monitor

One vital difference, the difference between matter and Spirit, lay between the teachings of Christ Jesus and the scholastic theology of his day; but that difference covered the whole distance between understanding the essential vitality of Truth and preaching ineffectual theories. Men turned from the tabernacles to the first Christian because they saw that his religion could give them help,—simple, direct, immediate. By parable and demonstration he taught them that God could not produce anything unlike Himself, and they responded to the logical power of this truth, in recovery from sickness, liberation from sin, deliverance from danger, and resurrection from death. His religion, in short, met the test of practicality; and when he sent out his disciples, he insisted that they, too, must give practical proof, by healing the sick and casting out evils, that they had understood his teachings. Speaking of his commission to them, Mrs. Eddy says, on page 31 of Science and Health: "First in the list of Christian duties, he taught his followers the healing power of Truth and Love. He attached no importance to dead ceremonies. It is the living Christ, the practical Truth, which makes Jesus 'the resurrection and the life' to all who follow him in deed."

In this hour of the world's testing, old material reliances, false modes and methods, are being abandoned, one by one, because of their disclosed inutility. In such a testing time, a man's religion must, like everything else, furnish a reason for its being. Can it stand the test of practical application? Can it help him who has been summoned by the necessity of the hour, from the superficialities, to answer the challenge of war and death? Obviously the day of theoretical Christianity is set.

Christian Science accepts the challenge and declares a practical standard of Christianity. It acknowledges that because Jesus proved his ability to deliver men from all manner of disease, difficulties, and death, through his understanding of God, the same vitality must inhere in Christianity to-day, to be demonstrated in just the degree that it is understood. Any attempt to delete this power of demonstration from Christianity amounts to a denial of Christianity itself, since its Founder specifically declared that acceptance should consist in the ability to heal the sick, cast out evils, and raise the dead. Mrs. Eddy perceived that Jesus' works were based upon his understanding of divine Principle, which alone could explain those works; and this being so, the power of demonstration must always be manifested whenever and wherever the operation of divine Principle is understood. Thus it is that in Christian Science the action of understanding and practice are inseparable. And it was because Mrs. Eddy had herself proved this fact, that she was able to declare, on page 98 of Science and Health, "Mystery does not enshroud Christ's teachings, and they are not theoretical and fragmentary, but practical and complete; and being practical and complete, they are not deprived of their essential vitality."

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