Article October 11, 1930 Issue

Reason and Revelation

Mary E. Young Brown

"The dream that matter and error are something must yield to reason and revelation," says the Leader of the Christian Science movement, Mary Baker Eddy, in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 347). It should be noted that she does not say reason or revelation, but states with precision "reason and revelation."

When an individual first takes up the study of Christian Science, it frequently appeals to him from the standpoint of reason. If he is a thinker, he may already be aware of the inescapable logic that everything must proceed from something, or, in other words, that every effect must have a cause; and he also knows that an effect must be like its cause in substance and in character. Human reason, however, demands an explanation as to why. in the domain of human affairs, there seem to be discrepancies between this theory and its objectification. The thinker sees the sinner apparently achieve success through dishonest practices; and he hears the physicist proclaim that intelligence springs from nonintelligence; as, for instance, that ideas spring from brain lobes, which are wholly material. This causes him to analyze the subject even more critically, and he finally reaches the perception that beyond all apparent causation there must be a primary cause, or that which Christian Science variously denominates as God, Principle, or Mind.

From this progressive thinking the student finds himself ready to enter upon a line of deductive reasoning based upon the premise that this first cause is eternal, indestructible, infinite, harmonious. He concedes that since this cause is infinitely harmonious it cannot have within itself the seeds of discord; and since there is no other cause there is nothing from which discord and decay can spring. He recognizes that what to him had seemed cause, in the first place, was but a false concept of cause.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

Fulfillment, not Postponement