(Pastor’s letter.)

My dear_______ … I have wondered if I might not perhaps say a helpful word to you. When I met your brother this morning, and he told me how troubled your family were feeling over your acceptance of Christian Science, and consequent giving up of business, I determined that I would write, and that very earnestly, believing that in view of our hearty friendship heretofore, you would not take it amiss. I will only refer to the Christian Science question to say, that all that is true in it, we have long had as Unitarians and I have been preaching it for many, many years. I should feel troubled indeed if my preaching left you in any doubt as to the clear eyed vision of the Unseen and Eternal, which it is the special mission of our liberal faith to impart. My purpose now, is to advise you not to take what seems a very unwise step, in flinging away the business opening you had. We used to wish so much (you and I) for the means of doing good, and of carrying out this and that enterprise of reform. You had the promise before you of some day finding yourself in command of the means to help the needs of the poor and out-cast ones. I beg you not to let such an opportunity slip. Be led and advised (for you are yet very young,) by those, who, as your own flesh and blood, love you more tenderly and truly than any strangers can. To them surely, and to a recognition of their love and sacrifices for you, you owe your first duty. Your family are feeling very worried and troubled because you have become a Christian Scientist. Let the new views pass for what they are worth, but stick bravely and truly to business duties. Distrust any influences that would lead you to neglect the every day duties which God has set you to do. Think how young you are, and be guided a while yet by those who have loved and tenderly led you from a child.

Affectionately yours,
“__________”

(Answer to Pastor’s letter.)

My dear Pastor and Friend:—Your letter at hand. All your interest in my material welfare is appreciated, and excusing you for not having mentioned what to me is alone of value, my spiritual consciousness, I will answer your letter at once. You say that you desire to send me a helpful word. As a professing disciple of Christ (Truth) I would expect to hear through you his voice,— “the words that I speak unto you they are Spirit and they are Life.” You advise me instead, to consider an opening for engaging in the business of the world. You chose to preach the Gospel! “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” “We did wish for the means of doing good;” and for the inspiration received through you, I am very thankful. But I have learned that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof”; that Divine Mind is the great creative Power; I acknowledge but one God or Mind, “in whom we live, and move and have our being.” I am His idea, child, made therefore in His own image and likeness; spiritual and not material. God’s word to me and to you is “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.” If an earthly relative could provide for me, can I not trust my Father, who clothes the lilies that toil not neither spin; but yet are arrayed in glory? I have chosen spiritual things. I am walking therefore after Spirit and not after flesh. I am endeavoring “to establish His kingdom on earth.” The things of Spirit can only be discerned by the spiritually minded. Flesh and blood, mortal sense—the belief of Life, Substance, and Intelligence in matter—cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven.

You say I owe my first duty to earthly relations. I hold it to be to my highest consciousness of God, Good. He says “seek ye first the kingdom of heaven,”—understanding of the power of the Christ-Mind, not of the carnal mind. This supposed mind is hypnotism, mesmerism, the power of one human will over another, and this, Christ, Truth destroys. Those whom you call my own will not go with me in this way; Christ “came not to bring peace, but a sword.” Truth and error antagonize. The flesh (mortal thought) and Spirit war continually. Persons who start from opposite premises cannot harmonize. I have never left one of my family. I hold them in tender Christ-Love; but this is a two-edged sword to the opposite thought, and the Christ Mind hath no fellowship with the carnal, because it is Light and not darkness. The Light is the real and the darkness the unreal; Light will dispel all shadows. I will “stick bravely and truly to my work,” now that I know I also can do the work Jesus did. I am working out my “own salvation with fear and trembling”; destroying with the sword of the Spirit, “the word of God,” the works of the devil. I “distrust any influence that would lead me to neglect this my first duty.” I have learned that they who do the will of my Father, are my brothers and sisters, and their lives correspond to those of the holy apostles in earnestness to do the will of the Father, and in purity and high realization of Love. This is the Life I have always struggled to reach, but could find no one to lead me to. Like the prodigal son, I fed on husks. But now having found my Father’s house, I have entered, and shall never return again to the husks.

Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and no man cometh to the Father except through me.” The Christ, Truth is the Way he meant, and not any opinion about the person, of the man Jesus. He said “the Father and I are one.” He knew God is Spirit, not matter, and that all are one with him, in Spirit. He knew matter to be unreal, and that Truth destroyed it. Jesus as our Way-shower trod the winepress alone: can we refuse the Life disclosed to us through him? This Life is spiritual and not material. Man is the idea of God, therefore “spiritual and not material,” matter is that which seemeth to be, but is not; it is no more real, and no more Substance, than the creation of a dream.

All who voice the teachings of theology, have much to answer for. The Christ Life, that is of Spirit is not lived by them. They live in the senses, and from this false sense of existence, preach the error or lie that our Master came to destroy. He who preaches from this premise voices error. Jesus asked his disciples “whom do men say that I am?” They all believed matter to be his real self, and only Peter discerned that he was “the Christ the son of the living God.” Jesus said “flesh and blood (mortal sense) has not revealed this to you.” Mortals will never discern their reality through material sense. Man is the reflection of the Divine Mind; it does not yet appear what he will be when the sense of life in matter is destroyed. Opposition to Truth brings swift retribution. Gamaliel saw this when he said, “if this work or this counsel be of men it will come to naught, but if it be of God beware lest haply ye be found to be fighting against God.”

And the prophet foresaw the present time when he said of false teachers: “Woe unto the shepherds that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture saith the Lord.” “The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath my Word, let him speak my Word faithfully.” “Behold I am against them that prophesy lying dreams saith the Lord, and do tell them and cause my people to err by their lies; yet I sent them not, nor commanded them, neither shall they profit this people at all saith the Lord.” “For they are not all Israel which are of Israel” that is, it is not the children of the flesh that are “children of God.” To those who discern this, and follow Spirit the promise is; “I will call that my people which was not my people, and her beloved, which was not beloved, and it shall be in the place where it was said unto them ‘Ye are not my people,’—there shall they be called sons of the living God.” For the consummation of sin is come, as it is written, in the prophet Daniel: “and for this end, hath the Lord shortened the times and the days, that his beloved might hasten his coming to his inheritance.” And Jesus said, “Shall the blind lead the blind and shall not both fall in the pit?” And the apostle; “And all this has God subjected to our understanding.”

Henceforth you can meet me only by coming to the Truth. I can never go back to you. As an ambassador of Christ I beseech you to accept the Christ, the love to which all must at length come. The work of our elder Brother was to free mortals from false claims of evil, or the senses, and to show man the divinity of Truth, and the way to at-one-mentScience & Health with his Father. “I am persuaded that neither life nor death, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate, us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In tender Christ Love, I am yours. — — — —