The most radical argument in the whole world is that of Christian Science. "If you wish to know the spiritual fact," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 129 of Science and Health, "you can discover it by reversing the material fable, be the fable pro or con,—be it in accord with your preconceptions or utterly contrary to them." This is because the evidence of Truth entirely reverses the evidence of the physical senses. Instead of a world of material phenomena, it offers a world of spiritual ideas. "Metaphysics," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 269 of Science and Health, "resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul." In the same way, Christ Jesus, seated on Jacob's well, outside the city of Samaria, said to his disciples, "Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest."

Now, while Jesus rested on the parapet of the well at Sychar, Cæsar, divus Cæsar, Cæsar the god, as the Romans came to call him, sat on the imperial throne. It was the day of the Roman triumph. The day when the procession of the victorious general swept along the Via Sacra. He had been victorious in a material struggle, and he expressed his triumph in a material manner. His captives followed the wheels of his chariot: in the amphitheater, before the sun set, other captives were to die, making holiday for him and the free men of Rome. The Roman was indeed the least metaphysical of mortals. Life to him was a purely physical problem. Had it been otherwise Horace could never have written that the cattle were safe in the pastures, and the sailor on the main; that the home would remain pure, and that sin would not go unpunished, so long as the worker, coming home at dusk, remembered that all this was owing to the providence of Cæsar, the god. Thus victory of any sort was to the Roman a triumph over another man. He was by nature and training almost incapable of understanding what Christ Jesus meant when he declared, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me," a saying which Paul later compressed into the three words, "I die daily."

What Jesus was endeavoring to tell his listeners, what Paul was struggling to impress upon the church in Corinth, was that the only victory any man can have is over himself; in other words, that the only enemy any one can have is the sum total of all that is unlike God, all that is out of Principle, in his own consciousness. "Simply count your enemy," Mrs. Eddy says, on page 8 of "Miscellaneous Writings," "to be that which defiles, defaces, and dethrones the Christ-image that you should reflect." The only victory there can be, then, is in conquest of the material self, in putting off the old man with his lusts, and putting on the new.

Christian Science is the simplest thing imaginable, simply because it is the truth. It is so simple that trained thinkers, following its clue to a certain point, have balked at the very simplicity of its conclusions. It teaches that the universe is a universe of ideas, and not of objective material phenomena. Starting with such a theory, demonstration must take the form of proving that Mind and not matter governs. But this Mind is claimed to be not the human mind, which is itself a counterfeit of reality, but divine Mind, Truth, or Principle, which in the Bible is described as God. Of this truth, Christ Jesus declared that a knowledge would make men free, and this knowledge is in turn described, throughout the New Testament, as a scientific knowledge. The attempt, then, to demonstrate the truth of this knowledge must take the form of an effort to resolve things into thoughts, and to exchange matter for Spirit, and just in proportion as this is successfully done is the measure of the individual victory. When the Roman emperors threw the Christians to the lions, these martyrs, or witnesses to the power of Truth, gained a victory to the extent that their recognition of spiritual reality was uncowed by the physical evidence of human brutality. But, with a greater understanding of Principle, Daniel gained a complete victory over his enemies and the lions, by first gaining a victory over himself.

What was Daniel's victory? Was it not clearly that he resolved things into thoughts, and realized that these thoughts were spiritual and not material? For him the lions' den was filled with angels, which Mrs. Eddy has defined, on page 581 of Science and Health, as "God's thoughts passing to man; spiritual intuitions, pure and perfect; the inspiration of goodness, purity, and immortality, counteracting all evil, sensuality, and mortality." These angels accompanied Daniel to the lions' den because they had been his constant companions before. And this was the protection of which Christ Jesus spoke to Peter, in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he said, "Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?" The den in which Daniel found himself became then the house of the Lord, his own consciousness of Life and Truth and Love, and the lions his own spiritual courage. He had realized that materiality and sensuality were no part of the real man, of the image in the divine Mind, and therefore there was no longer any reason for him to fear. Seeing himself spiritually, he could not fear for himself; seeing the lions spiritually, he could find no occasion for fear. He had seen the truth about the situation, and the fact that Truth is all that exists had made him free.

What then had he conquered? Simply his own materiality. What was there to conquer? For him, nothing but this materiality. Then when a man "dares to be a Daniel," he starts upon the conquest of his material self, and he does this by daily denying himself, denying this materiality, and taking up his cross, the consequences of this denial, and following Principle. That is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, of Christian Science demonstration, which is only another name for victory.

Frederick Dixon.