From the time the Christian Science movement was started, something approaching half a century ago, down to the present, it has been usual for people who never think at all to follow the lead of others who have thought if possible less, in speaking of a Christian Science which is neither Christian nor scientific. As an epigram, this may be said to contain all the disabilities common to epigrams, without any of the brilliance which sometimes makes them inspiring and occasionally instructive. During the seventeen years that Christian Science may be said to have been seriously established in England, it has been my fate to read this phrase, dragged in by its shoulders by writes who could no more give you an intelligent definition of historic Christianity or of natural science than they could of the teaching of Mrs. Eddy. They have, however, read it so often that they have come to believe it, just as George IV is declared to have described the charge of the Union Brigade at Waterloo so perpetually as to have come to believe that he led it.

What is the meaning of the term Christian? If you are satisfied with the dogmatic rendering of it, it means a person who accepts the teaching of the Greek church, the church of Rome, the Anglican church, the Nonconformist bodies, or any other sect which has existed a sufficient number of years to have become regarded as orthodox. It must not be forgotten for one moment that every orthodox sect has been through a period of being considered heretical. Christianity has not changed; therefore, if the heretical sects ever were heretical, they cannot now be Christian; and if they are Christian now, they can never have been heretical. The heretic of yesterday is, however, always the orthodox of today.

All the time that the sects were fighting as to what constituted a Christian, the Bible was telling them, only they had not time for that. A Christian, everybody will admit, is a person who accepts the teaching of Jesus the Christ. What people differ over is what this teaching is. Jesus himself no doubt realized that these differences would ensue. AT all events, he took pains to leave a definition so complete and so scientific as to put it beyond the wit of human ingenuity successfully and eventually to pervert it, short of any means but by destroying the Bible. Not only in one gospel, but in all the gospels, he declared, directly and indirectly, that precept must go with practise, and theory be made good by demonstration. "He that believeth on me," he said, "the works that I do shall he do also." The simplicity of the language is so remarkable that all the ingenuity of theology has stumbled in the attempt to explain it away. A Christian is necessarily one who believes in the teaching of Jesus, and therefore a Christian as a believer is only entitled to the name in the exact proportion in which he succeeds in repeating the demonstration or object-lessons given by Jesus himself. Now the great body of these object-lessons was devoted to the healing of the sick. Delete from the text of the Bible the works of physical healing and you delete a great portion of that text. As if in order that there might be no mistake on the subject, Jesus' instructions to his own disciples were to preach the gospel and to heal the sick.

Obvisouly, the only gospel which can be the gospel of Jesus the Christ, is a gospel which results in the healing of sickness and sin. He went perhaps even farther than this in his explanation to the disciples of John. When John sent his disciples to ask if he was the Christ, he replied, "Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached." In other words, he answered him on the same lines the taught his own disciples, with the exception that perhaps he laid even greater stress on the necessity of physical healing. If one thing is more certain than another, then it is that, in the direct words of Jesus, the only proof that a man is a Christian is the fact that he is doing the works which Jesus did, and giving the "signs following." This is the Christian Science definition of a Christian, and the man who is doing the works is giving a far greater proof that he understands the gospel than the man who is burning or torturing somebody else for not agreeing with him.

There is a sort of infantile belief in the human mind that science is something confined to the examination of material phenomena. As a matter of fact, this has been expressed in the direct statement that it is confined to secondary causes which are material, and that primary causes, which may be spiritual, are beyond its cognizance. It may be remarked at the outset, that primary spiritual causes never produce secondary material causes, unless the graope can produce thorns. This, however, though it is an important point in the Christian Science teaching of the unreality of matter, only affects the present question incidentally. What is quite certain is this: That if you start with the admission that you can know nothing of primary causes, you are never likely to. If Newton had been content to say that nobody could ever know why the apple dropped, he at least would never have been very likely to. If Mrs. Eddy had been content to say that nobody could ever understand how Jesus healed the sick, she, too, would never have been very likely to. Mrs. Eddy had, on the contrary, the scientific instinct in a very marked degree. She was determined to find out how the healing of primitive Christianity was accomplished, and she found this out in the most scientific manner, first, by a process of deduction, formed by accepting Principle as omnipotent, harmonious, and infinite, and deducing the harmony of what may be termed spiritual phenomena from this; and, secondly, by the process of induction, that is to say, by collecting an enormous mass of evidence in the matter of healing, and tracing it back to this First Cause, the infinite, omnipotent, omniscient good which men in general have agreed to term God. Whatever else may be said about science, science is the absolute knowledge of absolute truth.

Either the teaching of Jesus the Christ is absolute science or else it is mere fable. It is absolutely futile to say that it was God interfering with His own laws, first, because even God could not break a law of God; and secondly, because Jesus himself declared that the works he had done must be done by men of flesh and blood. Now Jesus broke every law of natural science which natural scientists have ever described as law,—he healed sickness by a word; he fed the multitude with a handful of bread; he carried the boat across the lake in a moment of time; he calmed the tempest with three words; he raised the dead; and he broke the law of gravitation by walking on the water several centuries before that law was discovered. This is what Mrs. Eddy pointed out. This is what she declared to be science. This is what Christian Science says is science, and this is what the world is one day going to admit is science. Science is law; and law is that in which no variation is possible. The statements of law respecting physical phenomena change with every decade of every century, very much as human conceptions of Christianity change. Throughout all these changes during the Christian era, however, one thing has stood, namely, the knowledge of the Christ as taught and demonstrated by Jesus of Nazareth. This knowledge of the Christ is the most absolute and therefore the truest thing which has ever come to humanity, and the nearer the science of today approaches the knowledge of the Christ, the more, and not the less, scientific it becomes. There is a phrase in the Bible which is translated "knowledge of God." The true translation of the Greek is, full, exact, and so scientific knowledge of God; in other words, an absolute knowledge of absolute truth, which is the understanding of the Christ. Jesus taught it in the first century of the Christian era, and, in spite of all the materiality of mankind, it has endured just as—if a human parallel is admissible—the Arctic solitudes have existed though men did not tread them, and the power of steam was potent though men had not subdued it. "I knew," Mrs. Eddy writes on page 109 of Science and Health, "the Principle of all harmonious Mind-action to be God, and that cures were produced in primitive Christian healing by holy, uplifting faith; but I must know the Science of this healing, and I won my way to absolute conclusions through divine revelation, reason, and demonstration." That demonstration resulted in the rediscovery of the true teaching of Jesus which today is termed Christian Science. To quarrel with Mrs. Eddy for having discovered it is about as sensible as to quarrel with the sun for giving light, and about as likely to affect the question.