Article December 13, 1919 Issue

Immortality of the Word

NELLIE B. MACE

The Christian Scientist is as confident of the immortality of the words of Mary Baker Eddy as he is certain that the words of Jesus the Christ are immortal. His assurance is born of the fact, not yet fully recognized by the world, that Mrs. Eddy's exposition of Truth is wholly based upon the Master's teaching. Jesus himself did not claim to have originated the truth. "My doctrine is not mine," he said, "but his that sent me. If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself." He had discerned divine Principle, Truth, which has no beginning; and he had demonstrated to his own satisfaction and that of the sufferers who thronged him, that there is no reality apart from Spirit and spiritual harmony. Because he understood the eternality of Principle, he knew that the word or idea which expresses it is likewise eternal, and he was therefore able to declare, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." It was for the same reason that Mrs. Eddy, knowing in her spiritual illumination that she had grasped the truth of Jesus' teachings and that her written word had not departed from it, declared (Miscellany, p. 178), "If the world were in ashes, the contents of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures' would remain immortal."

According to Jewish custom, Jesus was thoroughly versed in the law and the prophets, that part of the Bible which is known as the Old Testament. What he read in them was a record of the conflict between Spirit and the flesh. He saw that exactly as the people had grasped the spiritual meaning of the law and had obeyed it, they had progressed out from the dominion of the flesh. As Ezra, standing with the people in the street that was before the water gate, "read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading," so Jesus, with his innate spiritual perception, read the law and the prophets with far greater understanding, and caused those who were receptive of the spiritual truth also to understand. To his contemporaries, whose materialism buried the spiritual idea in ritual, and who consequently had no demonstrable understanding of spiritual power, he said, "Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge."

In her reading of the law and the prophets, Mrs. Eddy found the same unfolding spiritual truth that Jesus understood and demonstrated, but she found it amplified and illuminated by Jesus' life and words, as recorded in the New Testament; and the outcome of her spiritual discovery was the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." It is well known that certain scholars of Scriptural prophecies marked the year 1875—the year in which the Christian Science textbook was first published—as the time of the second coming of the Christ. Mrs. Eddy herself regarded the authorship of her book, not as hers personally, but as hers under the dictation of divine Truth or the spirit of the Christ. "I should blush to write of 'Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures' as I have, were it of human origin, and were I, apart from God, its author" (Miscellany, p. 115). When she therefore ordained the Bible and "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" to be the pastor that should preach for the church and the world, as recorded in the Manual (Art. XIV, Sect. 1), she was simply obedient to the natural and inevitable evolution of Truth, as discerned with more or less clearness by the prophets, understood and demonstrated by Jesus the Christ, and finally revealed to this age in its absolute Science.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

Not the Timid but the Meek are Blessed