Editorial May 26, 1951 Issue

"A MIND-HEALING CHURCH"

Helen Wood Bauman

Mary Baker Eddy founded her church on the comforting Christ-principle, which heals and restores the sinful and suffering. She gives this record in "Retrospection and Introspection" (pp. 43, 44): "At a meeting of the Christian Scientist Association, on April 12, 1879, it was voted to organize a church to commemorate the words and works of our Master, a Mind-healing church, without a creed, to be called the Church of Christ, Scientist, the first such church ever organized." Whatever changes in organization followed in later years, the purpose of the original church has remained. As "a Mind-healing church" it began, and so it will continue until the last vestige of human ignorance and evil is destroyed by the true theology which it teaches.

The entire function of the Church of Christ, Scientist, centers on the revelation of Christian Science, which Mrs. Eddy received from Mind, proved to be authentic by healing in countless cases, and preserved in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." The confusing mist of material sensation lost its reality to our Leader's sense of life when spiritual insight disclosed to her that God is the only Father of man and that all the sons of God are united in indivisible love and brotherhood. The mission of her church is to bring to light the universal fatherhood and motherhood of God, the consequent brotherhood of man, and the law, or divine Science, which unites Parent and child in perpetual harmony and substance.

What no individual can do alone, the church can accomplish through the power of unity, even the total destruction of the mortal dream, in which man appears to be living in fragile flesh, insubordinate to God, and subject to pain and destruction. In a letter to a group of branch churches published in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" Mrs. Eddy asks a reason for the light of resurrection so evident among them, and she answers her own query in the following words (p. 164): "It is unity, the bond of perfectness, the thousandfold expansion that will engirdle the world,—unity, which unfolds the thought most within us into the greater and better, the sum of all reality and good."

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