Editorial January 14, 1950 Issue

PERFORMANCE, NOT CONTENTION, PERSUADES

George Channing

Proof of Christian Science is not established by debate; it is established by results. Verbal contention over the efficacy of Christianity has no persuasive power and very little purpose. Restoration to health, harmony, dominion, competence, when these seem to have been lost, is, in most instances, an irresistible persuader that divine Love is real. It is likely to win him who experiences it and also him who witnesses it. Since the restorative power is available to anyone in the degree that he understands the Comforter which Christ Jesus promised to mankind, it should be unfailingly used to rout unbelief with conviction. For the Comforter is Christian Science, and the understanding of it has been made immediately possible by Mary Baker Eddy, its Discoverer.

Christ Jesus himself often emphasized the rule of performance as the basis of the appeal for acceptance of Christianity. To his contentious traducers at Jerusalem, for instance, he said: "If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works." Mrs. Eddy recognized that the winsomeness of Christian Science, the final statement of Christianity, rests on the same basis. Accordingly she declared (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 342), "The hour has struck when proof and demonstration, instead of opinion and dogma, are summoned to the support of Christianity, 'making wise the simple.'"

Christian Science is true metaphysics. The word metaphysics, as indicated by the Greek prefix meta, means above or beyond physics. In other words, Christian Science is above or beyond the five physical senses' evaluation of their so-called universe as substance matter. Christian Science begins with the cause of all that exists and acknowledges God, Mind, Spirit, as that cause. From that standpoint it recognizes the universe, including man, as conception; that is, as spiritual ideas conceived in the likeness of divine Mind, God, the only cause. Hence it teaches that God is the Mind of man. Since only divine Mind, God, can see and know its spiritual creation, only in the degree that an individual proves himself to be man by enthroning divine Mind as his Mind can he see himself and creation aright.

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