Editorial May 18, 2015 Issue

The new book and the new movement

Allison W. Phinney

Have you read the new Science and Health? I don’t mean the print edition with the colorful covers and the updated typography or the digital edition on your mobile phone. But the real question is, Does the content of the book feel newer than ever to you, almost as though you’ve never read it before? Is it so alive with fresh, spiritual meaning that you can hardly stop reading?

That was characteristic for many early Christian Scientists. They were convinced they had found something so sweepingly new that it made nearly everything else secondary. They saw the book’s message as worth giving oneself to, heart and soul. They waited weeks for the mail to deliver the book that had healed a relative who had been on the verge of death. And when it came, they stayed up night after night reading it. They traveled miles to find a group of likeminded people studying the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. As they saw healing after healing through Christian Science treatment, they left what they were doing to begin new lives as Christian Science practitioners and teachers, healing not only family but people in other countries and continents. Christian Science was obviously touching the deepest chords of their being, and their outward lives were not just being tidily improved but remarkably changed. The result was a new movement, a joining together for a great Cause that would ultimately help humanity as nothing else could.

The Old Testament of the Bible gives glimpses of the extraordinary newness flowing from obedience to God and having something of real spiritual experience. The book of Isaiah records God as saying: “Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert” (43:19).

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