Article December 15, 1923 Issue

The assertion that Mrs. Eddy says matter is...

Aaron E. Brandt, Committee on Publication for the State of Pennsylvania,—Pittsburgh

Dispatch-Herald

The assertion that Mrs. Eddy says matter is unreal, is true; and no exception is taken to the further statement that man is a spiritual, not a material creation, if by that statement nothing is included in the term "man" which is material and temporal in nature. That which is created in the image and likeness of God, Mrs. Eddy rightly concluded must partake of the nature of Spirit, and be spiritual and immortal. "A mortal sinner," she writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 475), "is not God's man;" and this statement squares with verses seven to nine of the third chapter of I John, and other passages found there. Now what did Mrs. Eddy discover? There are in the Bible literally hundreds of references in one form or another to the working of a law of God, a spiritual law; and thousands of people in this age have spent a lifetime in the study of the Scriptures, and of every religion and philosophy known to the world, yet have failed to find what Mrs. Eddy discovered, namely, a demonstrable understanding of that same spiritual law, applicable to the solution of every human problem and the present salvation of mankind from every ill to which flesh is heir. That she did not demonstrate to the satisfaction of the whole world every phase of this law of infinite Spirit in no way discounts the fact or the importance of her discovery. Nor did she borrow it from any human source; and therefore it is rightly considered a revelation.

The point is well stated by Emerson: "That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washinton, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow." In other words, original truth never is, nor can it be, borrowed from any human source. "No human pen nor tongue taught me the Science contained in this book, Science and Health; and neither tongue nor pen can overthrow it," Mrs. Eddy says in a paragraph in Science and Health, (p. 110) which begins with the words, "In following these leadings of scientific revelation, the Bible was my only textbook." The fact is that the leading modern natural scientists find it necessary to explain away matter, in order to reach logical conclusions; and many of them, Einstein included, seem to be converging rapidly towards a point on this question which Mrs. Eddy reached fifty years ago: "Matter is a human concept. Life is divine Mind" (Science and Health, p. 469). On this original and fundamental basis Christian Science has won its way round the globe in the face of every form of attack its opponents could invent; and it will stand, its adherents believe, after material religions and philosophy, and teaching based on the reality of both spirit and matter, have returned to dust, where they originated.

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