Editorial March 13, 1954 Issue

ADORNING CHRISTIANITY

Helen Wood Bauman

"Whatever adorns Christianity crowns the great purposes of life and demonstrates the Science of being," writes Mary Baker Eddy in her book "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 285). Not only peaceableness, which our Leader was discussing at this time, but every spiritual quality with its consequent blessing adorns Christianity. Without the purity and love, the integrity and justice and wisdom, of Christian character there can be no actual demonstration of the Science of being, for this Science is the Science of Christianity. Only one's Christliness can measure his ability to prove Christian Science. If one's efforts to prove it are not crowned with success, may this not be because his Christian spirit is lacking in the adornment of goodness?

We are living in the age of scientific Christianity. The divine Science which has come to our time does not dispense with Christianity, but enlivens and enriches it. It gives more tenderness to love, more stability to honesty, more compassion to forgiveness, more friendliness to service. It enhances faith and hope because it assures them the proof of perfection. It rectifies reason and will by revealing the Principle of intelligent action to be Love. This adorning of Christianity fulfills the purpose of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount to further the revelation of man as the law-governed, obedient image of Love. It was the Master who described the Comforter, divine Science, as "the Spirit of truth" (John 14:17). And Paul wrote (Rom. 8:9), "If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his."

In 1898 Mrs. Eddy sent a message to The Mother Church which she called "Christian Science versus Pantheism." In it, under the caption "the Grandeur of Christianity," she says (p. 12): "This closing century, and its successors, will make strong claims on religion, and demand that the inspired Scriptural commands be fulfilled. The altitude of Christianity openeth, high above the so-called laws of matter, a door that no man can shut." Only the altitude of Christianity reached through the adornment of Christly character can make the Churches of Christ, Scientist, truly Christian centers of scientific healing power. The church whose members express love and spiritual understanding, patience and integrity, attracts to its shelter those who seek what only the ministry of the Comforter can give them. But if "the accuser," the blind, critical, unforgiving spirit of so-called mortal mind, is permitted to prevail, there can be little of the Comforter present to bring rest and peace to the stranger groping for a higher Christianity.

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