Editorial June 4, 1966 Issue

Truth Made Comprehensible

Carl J. Welz

Mary Baker Eddy discovered the Science of divine metaphysical healing which she named Christian Science. She describes her discovery as follows: "My immediate recovery from the effects of an injury caused by an accident, an injury that neither medicine nor surgery could reach, was the falling apple that led me to the discovery how to be well myself, and how to make others so."^{Retrospection and Introspection, p. 24;} This was a great event for the human race. But as great, if not greater, is her work in making metaphysical ideas, which she discovered through research following her healing, comprehensible to human thought.

Christ Jesus indicated that the truths he lived and taught could not be understood by materialistic mentalities. When his opponents were arguing with him, claiming that God was their Father, Jesus said: "If God were your Father, ye would love me. . . . Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. . . . He that is of God heareth God's words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God.^{John 8:42-44, 47;}

Mrs. Eddy's message to humanity is the Science Jesus preached and demonstrated. It is a spiritual message, and it cannot be comprehended by materialistic minds. Yet she knew, when her discovery came, that human hearts yearn for the truth, and she devoted her life to the task of breaking through material sense in order to convey to mankind the spiritual message. In the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," she writes, "Apart from the usual opposition to everything new, the one great obstacle to the reception of that spirituality, through which the understanding of Mind-science comes, is the inadequacy of material terms for metaphysical statements, and the consequent difficulty of so expressing metaphysical ideas as to make them comprehensible to any reader, who has not personally demonstrated Christian Science as brought forth in my discovery."^{Science and Health, pp. 114, 115;} Later she explains the inadequacy of languages to express spiritual conceptions, and she adds, "The elucidation of Christian Science lies in its spiritual sense, and this sense must be gained by its disciples in order to grasp the meaning of this Science."^{p. 349 ;}