As a boy, I loved going with one of my older brothers to a Lutheran Sunday School on the Canadian prairie. The teachers were neighbors, the mothers of our schoolmates. Once, my brother brought home a sort of puzzle that I believe his Sunday School teacher had given him. On it were the words “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). That puzzle was always around our house, so those words of Jesus became fixed in my memory. 

A holy, inner fire inspired the early followers of Jesus to indeed preach the gospel widely, making their sharing of the Word not merely one element of their lives but their whole reason for being. 

Jesus promised that after his ascension what the King James Version of the Bible translates as “the Comforter” would always be present to guide people “into all truth” (John 15:26; 16:13). Mary Baker Eddy understood that she had discovered that Comforter, divine Science—the natural law of harmony based on God as infinite, unopposed Love. She recognized that the spiritual healing practice that flowed from this understanding of God is a Science, since it is based not on something miraculous but on the demonstrable facts of God and the reality that He has created.