Article November 13, 1920 Issue

"How forcible are right words"

PERCY PHILLIP VYLE

When the sunshine of the spiritual broke through the material shadow that lay over the world, ignorance received its first jolt for many centuries. To the world's amazement, this check was administered by a woman, Mary Baker Eddy, through a book, and in being both a key to the Scriptures and an analysis of the falsity of mankind's reasoning, the Christian Science textbook contains a collection of the most forcible words and phrasings to be found in literature. While the various angles of the educational value of Christian Science convey ample food for profitable thinking, the present purpose is to consider the healing power of the textbook and its unusual vocabulary, for it is only when the study of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" starts, that the student gradually begins to realize how wrong and restricted is even the best education when based on material hypotheses.

Outside the focus of Christian Science, research is on an unstable foundation; matter, as an unexplained and undefined "something," is its chief plank. Matter belief's tenacious foothold in the human consciousness permeates, influences, and molds a mortal's every thought. The effects of study and the results of applying its Principle are more perceptible in the attention devoted to Christian Science than in other branches of learning. In no other direction of inquiry is progress from problem to problem so convincing and determinate, nor is the ultimate as indisputably defined; neither is the reward for sincere endeavor so tangible as that which follows a comprehension of the logic and method of the operation of spiritual law.

Mrs. Eddy herself has told of the handicap of language in which to explain spiritual law, and the surprise of it is that she was so successful, surrounded and handicapped as she was by this restriction. In "Retrospection and Introspection" she says (p. 27): "As sweet music ripples in one's first thoughts of it like the brooklet in its meandering midst pebbles and rocks, before the mind can duly express it to the ear,—so the harmony of divine Science first broke upon my sense, before gathering experience and confidence to articulate it. Its natural manifestation is beautiful and euphonious, but its written expression increases in power and perfection under the guidance of the great Master."

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