Many of the Tribune-Democrat's readers must have...

Malcolm Bayley, Committee on Publication for the State of Kentucky,—Benton

Tribune Democrat

Many of the Tribune-Democrat's readers must have rejoiced to read, in a recent issue, a Marshall county minister's plea for Christian unity, in which he quoted a clergyman, who wrote: "The living Christ in the living soul must be the goal of Christian revolution that wipes out inequalities of episcopacy, immersion, communion, creed, and similar denominational prejudices."

"What is this living Christ?" some may ask. The Christ we know to be synonymous with Messiah. "Christ expresses God's spiritual, eternal nature," writes Mary Baker Eddy, in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 333). That is exemplified in Jesus' statement, "Before Abraham was, I am;" by which he meant that the spiritual Christ, not the corporeal Jesus, antedated the Hebrew patriarch.

"It is the living Christ, the practical Truth," says Mrs. Eddy (ibid., p. 31), "which makes Jesus 'the resurrection and the life' to all who follow him in deed."

The clergyman deplores "denominational scrambles" and "broken brotherhoods," but how much more profitably might he not dwell upon those immortal points of unity which comprise our Master's teachings, his instructions to his disciples whom he sent to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick, and to the other seventy whom he appointed to the same work, and finally his undying promise that "these signs shall follow them that believe." Could there be any greater promises than those in which all followers of the Christ believe, promises of eternal life, of the efficacy of the prayer of the righteous, and that of Jesus, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free"—free from the bondage of sin, disease, grief, poverty, and death?

As Christians we profess to believe that God can heal us of our every ill; but how many of us break the First Commandment by making a god of materiality and vainly seeking to endow matter with the divine power and nature! How grateful are those of us who have learned the truth about God and man in His image and likeness, to the beloved woman who rediscovered the laws by which Jesus healed the sick and the sinning, and restored primitive Christianity to this age! Thousands testify weekly in Christian Science churches and in the Christian Science periodicals to recovery from every ill to which the flesh is heir, and to the overcoming of other discordant conditions.

"Our unity with churches of other denominations must rest on the spirit of Christ calling us together," wrote Mrs. Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, in "Pulpit and Press" (p. 21), as long ago as 1895, and she continued (p. 22): "All Christian churches have one bond of unity, one nucleus or point of convergence, one prayer,—the Lord's Prayer. It is matter for rejoicing that we unite in love, and in this sacred petition with every praying assembly on earth,—'Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. When the doctrinal barriers between the churches are broken, and the bonds of peace are cemented by spiritual understanding and love, there will be unity of spirit, and the healing power of Christ, Truth, will prevail. Then shall Zion have put on her most beautiful garments, and her waste places have budded and blossomed as the rose."A correction was made in the February 22, 1930 Sentinel: ""On page 429 of the Sentinel for February 1, part of a quotation from page 22 of 'Pulpit and Press,' by Mrs. Eddy, was printed without quotation marks."

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