Article July 14, 1923 Issue

The Simplicity of Christian Science

SAMUEL FREDERICK SWANTEES

The simplicity of Christian Science is the simplicity of Truth. When understood from a spiritual viewpoint, simplicity always leads us back to God; for God is the source of true simplicity. The meaning of the word "simple" or "simplicity" is "single"; hence its peculiar adaptation to the things of God,—the God whose fundamental commandment is, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord." If we, therefore, desire to understand God, the simplicity which is of God will appear unto us, and God will be the one and only good to us. "The allness of Deity is His oneness," we read on page 267 of our textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy. Nothing that is obscure or difficult of understanding belongs to Christian Science. If its great simplicity or singleness of viewpoint is not understood, it is because human selfishness refuses to give up its belief in matter or its claim that there are barriers between God and His image and likeness. But this claim is false.

Now if the understanding of Christian Science or of its textbook is not above our apprehension, why is one beset so often by the argument that Christian Science or its textbook cannot be understood? That this is not a new phase of human experience may be seen from the rebuke Jesus administered to the people of his day for their lack of spiritual understanding, which he attributed entirely to their grossness or materialism. So the answer to our question is easy to find: it is the so-called carnal or mortal mind (the old serpent) that is making these arguments; and because of pride, selfishness, mad ambition, greed, or lust, we are listening. Man, Christian Scientists agree, is made in the image and likeness of God, even of infinite divine Mind. Can any one imagine the image and likeness of God, which expresses infinite Mind, declaring that it cannot understand God or the Science of Mind? What an absurdity! Then why should any one who at any time has taken up the study of Christian Science ever ally himself with such an erroneous declaration? Would it not be more in accord with Science to insist upon the spiritual fact that because man is the image and likeness of God, man of necessity must have, and by virtue of his divine birthright does have, the understanding of God in divine Science?

Evidently, therefore, mankind is allowing itself to be deceived as to the apprehension of Christian Science, when men and women declare they cannot understand the statements of this Science. Often it is a false sense of humility that causes us to say, "I cannot understand;" but more often it is just an unwillingness to renounce the material sense of self. Unselfed love is a fundamental requirement of Christian Science. No one can escape therefrom. Even those at the very beginning of their study of divine Science must in some way, be it ever so small, prove that love is unselfed before they can expect to advance in the demonstration of Christian Science. Now this unceasing demand of Christian Science is what makes carnal beliefs cry out, "Art thou come hither to torment us before the time?" It also makes false beliefs seek to quell this demand for spiritual understanding, and destroy alertness by the very common method of substitution; in other words, mortal mind claims to offer a short cut, as it were, to the kingdom of heaven, in which material sense and self need not to be sacrificed. But this method results only in a riot of the letter, of high-sounding phrases as empty of spiritual understanding as is "sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal."

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