Article March 4, 1922 Issue

An Interpreter

ANNE CLEVELAND CHENEY

It is said that in the ancient dramatic poem of Job occur the first recorded intimations of immortality—of man's awareness that life continues after the physical experience called death. After all these centuries the world is learning, through Christian Science, that Christ Jesus abolished death. Hitherto it has held that Christ Jesus merely proved mankind's intimations of immortality to be true by his resurrection from the dead and his ascension above the material state. The raising of Jairus' little daughter and of Lazarus, and the restoration of them to their customary earthly condition; the empty sepulcher of our Lord and his bodily appearance on the road to Emmaus before the ascension, had never been fully explained until the discovery of Christian Science, which teaches that, in raising the dead, Christ Jesus and his disciples merely took a further step in the demonstration of that divine Science by which they healed the sick. By means of this divine Science Mary Baker Eddy, its Discoverer and Founder, repeated many of the so-called miraculous works in this age, and her students, through the same power of Truth understood and demonstrated, have prevented many sufferers from experiencing death, restoring them to years of useful activity, after all other healing methods had failed. Mrs. Eddy discovered and afterwards proved that all the healing works of Jesus, which culminated in the raising of the dead, were in no wise miraculous, in the sense of being supernatural or of being a special dispensation to arrest temporarily God's law, but on the contrary were in natural obedience to divine law, the only real law, and simply revealed to human consciousness the continuous operation of that law; and that these "works," or scientific demonstration of the working of God's law, could be repeated in any age by any disciple who learned to apply, with a sufficient degree of understanding, the divine Principle.

It is significant to note that the same book of Job, which sets down the first dim apprehension of Life's ultimate triumph, also shadows forth, with much fidelity, the mission of the Christian Science healer. Elihu says of one who draws near to the great shadow: "If there be a messenger with him, an interpreter, one among a thousand, to shew unto man his uprightness: then he is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit. I have found a ransom." Mrs. Eddy writes in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," on page 276, "Having one God, one Mind, unfolds the power that heals the sick, and fulfils these sayings of Scripture, 'I am the Lord that healeth thee,' and 'I have found a ransom.'" The true demonstrator of God's law knows that it is not he who does the work; he knows himself to be merely a messenger, an interpreter of the one Mind to show to man his uprightness.

Christian Science teaches that all the misery of the race has arisen from the first basic idolatrous myth which claims there is more than one Mind; that there is an intelligence inherent in matter, Mind's opposite, and that man is the creation of both these opposites, Mind and matter, and that he has fallen so far from the control of divine Mind as to become almost entirely material—physique, a finite personality, with a mind of his own, and a thoroughly insubstantial soul resident somewhere in a supposedly substantial body. The office of the Christian Science practitioner, the messenger or interpreter of the one Mind, is to reverse utterly these misstatements of error by demonstration of the statements of Truth. A clear understanding on the part of the Christian Scientist dispels the mirage of sense and brings out, more and more, the likeness of divine Mind, the real man—as the Icelandic Scriptural translation of man has it, "that which rises up." Thus the Christian Science practitioner sees man's uprightness, and some portion of the Adam dream vanishes into its native nothingness; and the realization of health and harmony is brought out in the experience of the one who has sought help.

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