Editorial September 2, 1939 Issue

Universality

Evelyn F. Heywood

When Jesus prayed, in the following words, "That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us," he was proclaiming a divine universality which is the basic teaching of Christian Science. This was and is the mission of the Christ, to bring, without qualification or hindrance, to all who will receive it, the blessings and privileges of sonship. He had come first to his own people, to those who, because of promise and prophecy, had greater reason to expect him than had others, but he foresaw and foretold the time when there would be one fold and one shepherd.

Jesus came preaching the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and everywhere he found himself opposed and assailed by formalism and narrowness, by tradition and precedent, by those things which preclude and separate, which alienate and destroy. Yet because of his relationship with the Father he knew that the oneness of God and man is an eternal fact, and therefore can never be disproved. Though heaven and earth might pass away, his words would not pass away.

When the Science of Christianity was revealed to Mary Baker Eddy, she saw not only that the appeal and power of Truth are universal, and that all men are included in its loving benediction, but that in the understanding of God's allness, evil is disclosed as nothing. On pages 102 and 103 of "Miscellaneous Writings," in confirmation of this fact she has written, "Science defines omnipresence as universality, that which precludes the presence of evil." Our Leader saw that the allness and oneness of Love and of Life must mean the forever banishment of hatred and of mortality. Throughout her writings and in her whole attitude towards humanity, she showed the universality of Truth as it had been revealed to her. She demanded of her followers that they also show forth in their lives the universal nature of Love, that they may draw to them, in the way Jesus did, the sick and weary.

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