The average man, so far from taking the advice of the wise man out of the East to choose his words at least as carefully as his food, commonly gives far more thought to his kitchen than to his dictionary. He may, indeed, be said to riot in an inspired carelessness in his use of language. Mr. Ruskin once declared that if you employed words accurately you were in positive danger of being misunderstood. Did not Mrs. Gamp, for example, convert the innocent four syllables of aggravation, in a night, as it were, from increase to irritation? It is, indeed, this accuracy in the employment of words which is so "aggravating" to the sensuous man, the man to whom all discipline is a trial. It means the extinction of the "purple period" with its aroma of cheap sentiment, and the acceptance of a scientific terminology. It means the method of Huxley in preference to the method of Doctor Watts, and that of the fourth gospel in distinction to that of the psalms. It means mental discipline instead of slipshod thinking, and when people realize this, they will stop and ask themselves what they mean by a word like inspiration before they use it.

If you look up the word inspiration in a dictionary, you will discover that it means, first, "the drawing in of breath," and, second, "divine influence," and between the two there seems a great gulf fixed. Even when you come to "divine influence," there is a wide margin for argument. It extends all the way from the Mumbo-Jumbo of Africa to the idols of Hindustan, or from the temples of Pagan Rome to the temples of Christian America. It includes all that separates the Jehovah of Moses from the God of Paul. It is obvious, then, that there is a vital difference between the inspiration of an Indian medicine man and the inspiration of Peter at Lydda. And it becomes of tremendous importance to humanity to fathom the difference in all its varying shoals and depths. But before this can be done the world must learn to think scientifically.

That famous chooser of words, Monsieur Renan, used to be much exercised, not to say "aggravated," by the terminology of the fourth gospel. The easy flow of the Greek of the Synoptists was unction to him. It never grated on his well tuned ear, and so he was able to read it without being faced by the metaphysical dilemmas which might, and for that matter did, lie hidden under its perfection of rhythm. In the case of the fourth gospel all this was changed. It opened with a metaphysical challenge, the scientific meaning of the Logos, and that note of challenge was sustained down to the very last words of the peroration, with their final accentuation of what Mrs. Eddy means, in writing on page 334 of Science and Health: "This dual personality of the unseen and the seen, the spiritual and material, the eternal Christ and the corporeal Jesus manifest in flesh, continued until the Master's ascension, when the human, material concept, or Jesus, disappeared, while the spiritual self, or Christ, continues to exist in the eternal order of divine Science, taking away the sins of the world, as the Christ has always done, even before the human Jesus was incarnate to mortal eyes."

In order to hope to understand this, however, the would be walker in the footsteps of the Christ must trust, not to his own intellectual grip, but to inspiration, since, to quote Mrs. Eddy once again, this time from page 319 of Science and Health, "The divine Science taught in the original language of the Bible came through inspiration, and needs inspiration to be understood." Yet ask the man in the street

What inspiration means, and he will reply in some such nebulous definition as those of the dictionaries. Ask the scholar, learned in the scholarship of this world, and he will give you something perilously near a stone for bread, in, perhaps, that apothegm of Matthew Arnold, "the not ourselves which makes for righteousness." A very contradiction in terms this, if the writer of the fourth gospel was accurate in stating of God that "all things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made;" if the writer of Genesis told the truth, when he said, "And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good;" and if Jesus the Christ knew what he was saying when he taught all mankind to pray, "Our Father which art in heaven."

Now, if this is not so the Bible is a mere melting pot of unessential statements, of unscientific phrases, and of carelessly employed words, one of which last is the word inspiration. It happens, however, that the word has a very definite and very metaphysical meaning. As employed by Paul, it is Oeotvevotos or "God-breathed," exactly what the writer of Genesis means, when he says, of man, that God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life," though that is another story. Anyway, inspiration, so far from being "the not ourselves which makes for righteousness," is the light of the human being awakening to his true self, as he puts off the carnal mind and puts on the Mind of Christ. Of course the Mind of Christ, being eternal, has always been present, but it is only as the illusion of the flesh is lost, through the inspiration of the Spirit, that this becomes clear. So Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 72 of Science and Health: "God, good, being ever present, it follows in divine logic that evil, the suppositional opposite of good, is never present. In Science, individual good derived from God, the infinite All-in-all, may flow from the departed to mortals; but evil is neither communicable nor scientific." What, then, is this stream of good but inspiration, and what is inspiration but a spiritual perception of reality, and so, of true manhood. It is, in a sentence, that scientific knowledge of God, referred to again and again in the Scriptures, of which Jesus spoke when he told the Jews, "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."