Sue Harper Mims, C.S.D.
Member of the Board of Lectureship of The Mother
Church,
The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts
I have come to talk of him who was and is the Way-shower to that sublime rest that remaineth to the people of God; and of that freedom which is purchased by the conquest of sin — the freedom of the sons of God.
Christian Science comes to every community with an olive branch.
The angels have always borne the same gospel to humanity — Peace on earth, good will to men — the very word gospel means Good-spell; the spell, the marvel of Good. The watching shepherds heard its heavenly music in the stilly night, on the Judean plains long ago, and Christian Science has caught its grand refrain, and is giving its sacred benison to you — to the world. "To Good, all things are possible; therefore evil is impossible. Good omnipotent reigneth. and there is naught beside." How sublimely did the old prophets constantly thunder down the ages God's declaration of His omnipotence.
In full sympathy with every holy aspiration of the human heart, with every true philanthropic desire to ameliorate earthly sorrow, Christian Science would add to, not take from, all that is really good. It teaches not a half-way, but a full salvation from all forms of evil. It is the gospel of Love fulfilling the law of Life.
Blind, indeed, are the eyes and heavy the ears that do not see, and at least in part understand, the vast import of this hour. The very deeps of mortal thought are stirred, and like a mighty giant the human mind is breaking the fetters that have bound it. A divine discontent with old limitations and imperfections marks this hour, a marvelous growth out of old conditions. A strange revival of effete philosophers and religions comes to be weighed in the balances of Christ, and found wanting. Astonishing strides in physical (so-called) sciences; a very tangled wilderness of human theories, dark despair, splendid hope, fear, and expectancy, a marvelous mental activity greet us, and we ask, What is Truth? Where is Truth?
Over this chaos a light is shining — it is the illumination of Divine Science. For the first time we see that the "strait and narrow way" is the path of scientific demonstration, fulfilling, but never violating divine law; and therefore, scientific in accord with an infinite, universal Principle.
The great heart of the Christian world is strongly appealing for Christ, not creed. Washington Gladden says: "The heart of the old religion is true, but we ministers must get it out of its fantastic settings and bring it home to human hearts. We must lay hold of the things that are vital and essential." Hall Caine, that close observer of men and times, says: "I feel very strongly, from observation and close study, this one thing, that the one great and supreme religious tendency of the time is a returning to that kind of Christianity that is represented in the early apostles." Rev. Carl Henry appeals for a forsaking of creeds and dogmas and a return to the sane and simple religion of Jesus, who obeyed and trusted God, and practised the Golden Rule. This would bring us into harmony with God, solve our problems, banish our pains, and make this world the abode of love and justice, happiness and peace. A limited sense of atonement has obstructed the healing and life currents of Christianity. Jesus' steps did not end at Calvary; he went on to the glorious victory of the resurrection morn, and the sublime triumphs over the flesh at the ascension, where he attained his at-one-ment with the Father — submerged in the pure spiritual sense of eternal Life and Love.
This deep Christian longing for Truth has brought the light again.
Some one has said, Man is question; God is answer.
Is Christian Science inspired? Is God a personal respecter of persons, or rather is God the infinite impersonal Good, Mind, Truth — the Principle of Being — Love, finding an entrance wherever humility, love, tenderness, purity, open a way for this divine Soul to manifest itself. Truth is "the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever." Infinity knows no beginning and no ending. What is, always was, and will be. Thus all human growth out of itself must consist of the unfolding, or awakening of universal or individual consciousness to the unchanging Truth of Being.
The capacity of the human mind is constantly enlarged by the poets, seers, prophets, who have been transparencies to let in this radiance of Truth. Jesus referred to this eternal fact when, piercing the pantheistic mist of material evolution, he said, "And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was," thus recognizing the eternal unity of Good, or God and man.
Each individual whose consciousness lets in even one ray of this true light is inspired and illumines human existence. When some one individual is unusually endowed, unique among men through great purity or spirituality, a flood of light unobstructed in the pure lens of his or her consciousness makes an era, a great epoch, and a great leader. Can we yet bear the splendor of these spiritual demands "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself?"
Isaiah, and the other prophets, reflecting divine Truth, made possible the hour in history when Mary the virgin, perceiving the divine origin of man, brought into human experience the Son of God — the Light of the world.
This began the Christian era, and the life of Jesus became and still is, the central fact of all history. This Godlike man walked over the Judean hills teaching the beautiful lesson of the lilies, discerning beyond the face of the sky the deeper meanings of life. He looked somewhat as other men, doubtless with an added majesty and grace, yet he reversed in his life every hitherto known condition; he was subject to none of the so-called laws of nature. With a divine thought, or spoken word, he healed the sick and raised the dead. He walked over the waves, was victorious over storm, tempest, and death, and ascended to his true, spiritual individuality in God.
Would not the understanding of this "mystery of godliness" be God's best gift to men? The early disciples did partly, if not fully understand it, as is evidenced by their words and deeds. Both Peter and Paul, being able to raise the dead, proved in many ways the power of Spirit over material conditions, and for several centuries after the advent of Jesus, Christianity was marked by these proofs of discipleship. If you believe in me, or understand me, said he, ye shall do the works that I do.
"They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." That is, my disciples understand the spiritual law of Good that annuls the material law of sin and death. As Paul writes in Romans, 8, "For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death." Paul boasted that he had given proofs of his discipleship by signs and wonders, although he had never seen the personal Jesus.
While the heart overflows with gratitude and love in contemplating this divine life, Jesus taught that it should be practical to us — we should follow him — atoning in our own experiences for our sins and for the sins of the world, and working out our at-one-ment with divine Principle, God, eternal Life, Truth, Love.
Is it too good to be true that God has sent His own Word to interpret this divine life to us? That another Comforter has come who fulfils Jesus' promise, "He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you." "He shall testify of me." "Even the Spirit of truth" leading into all Truth? No! Nothing is too good for infinite Love to do for mortals. Jesus, the sinless one, seeing that the absolute transcendentalism of his works would need centuries to become a part of universal human experience, that another Comforter must come, said, "The night cometh, when no man can work." "but when the Comforter is come, . . . he shall testify of me." This hour is here and now, another era for the world, an era when Wisdom, wedding in indissoluble union Science and Christianity, ushers in the reign of spiritual law, or Christian Science. Religious truth is converged in one systematized and perfect whole, the Science of Being. The dove of divine understanding which abode on Jesus is no longer a wanderer, but abides now and ever in consciousness, with "healing in his wings."
Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, was endowed even from childhood with great spirituality, seemed set apart, as it were, for a peculiar and holy mission, being led in strange ways to learn the deep and strange things of human existence. Hungering and thirsting for righteousness, in one grand moment, on the verge of the grave, God revealed Himself to her as the one all-inclusive Mind, the only Cause, Creator, and all creation as mental phenomena. She saw the allness of Mind and the consequent unreality of matter; this restored her to health, strength; and life and the Scriptures were illumined. She remembered the holy prophets, and the triumphs of Jesus over material conditions. She longed to know the Science of their works. She withdrew from society, studying deeply, prayerfully the Holy Scriptures, then with illumined vision she saw in the so-called miracles of the Bible, not a violation of law, but natural demonstrations of an eternal, universal Principle for all men, all times, all ages. Her resulting thought crystallized in the book "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." Mystery vanishes before the teachings of this book, the Science of God interprets His Son. Nothing but the Comforter whom God sends can interpret this wonder and glory of the world — the Christ manifest in the flesh.
Christian Science, revealing Jesus' absolute reversal of human conditions, shows that his mission was to destroy the results of false premises, and the three brief years of his ministry were occupied in teaching, and in healing all manner of diseases, and destroying sin and death.
This reversal of human subjection to material law, and the demonstration of the spiritual law of health, holiness, harmony, was due to the simple fact of One God, the infinite, loving Father, always blessing, feeding, clothing, sustaining His offspring. In loving reiteration he constantly taught this simple truth of man's relation to God. "Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?" "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?"
The sublime lesson is this, that the result from one basic premise is dominion, power, harmony, immortality; from the other, sin, expulsion from Paradise, discord, poverty, disease, and death. Jesus stated briefly his premise, "I know whence I came, and whither I go." "I came forth from the Father and I go to the Father." Paul states this metaphysically, "As in Adam (or human concept) all die, even so in Christ (or spiritual, immaculate concept) shall all be made alive."
Christian Scientists have given many proofs that this true basis from which Jesus worked the problem of being is just as potent now as then; there is perhaps not a disease known to the modern world, from leprosy to lunacy, that has not been healed in Christian Science. Demonstration in accord with a divine Principle must be the eternal heritage of man, not a phenomenal event for a brief period. This re-discovered method of primitive Christianity is the Holy Comforter. Coming through woman, it is divinely correlated with Jesus' life and works. In prophetic vision seeing this correlation he said the kingdom of heaven "is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it." The kingdom of heaven "is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened." Jesus was the man through whom we see Christ destroying the error that does not image Love and Life and Good. Paul says, "There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." Without Jesus' life of demonstration there would be no true, absolute science known to mortals.
The same Father is here, ever present, omnipotent Mind, ready to do the same work for us whenever the human mind is denied — surrendered — in selflessness, purity, and humility, and we let the same Mind be in us that was in Christ Jesus. We have only to put off our mortal thought to see God's glory fill the earth. We thus see that to deny the carnal mind, and put on the Christ Mind is the mental remedy for every ill — it is all mental, metaphysical. Only by reversing or changing our basis of thought — our standpoint — can we reverse our conditions. Do we not need a Comforter to bring to our remembrance the simple logic of Jesus? He said, make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt and his fruit corrupt. If God is Good and the only Cause, Creator, His creation and image must be perfect, even as He is perfect. Perfect God and perfect man must be the only fact. We have only to see as we are seen. If Good is the infinite Soul and Substance of man and the universe, then there is no room for evil. Life cannot die, eternal Substance cannot decay. Truth cannot know error. Good cannot produce His opposite.
Centuries ago Copernicus called the world to reverse its sense testimony regarding our planetary system. This seemingly important little planet (a type of our selfhood in matter) around which the moon and stars seemed to revolve, was dethroned and found not to be a center, but a tributary. This reversal opened to view an infinity of beauty, order, and grandeur. While yet we have not the full conception of what the stellar universe is as God sees it, yet all thought is enlarged and liberated by this higher sense of what it is.
About the same time Columbus, moved by faith in the unseen, left the old world and its limitations, to find, across the sea, a new continent. In this grand Republic, where all men are supposed to be free, physically, civilly, religiously, Christian Science is born, proclaiming the true sense and application of God as the infinite Principle of perfect Being, the only Source from whence are all things, and all things perfect as their Principle. "All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made." This infinite Principle, that the loving John named Love, was to that master metaphysician Paul, the Mind of Christ. This Mind was seen through the personal Jesus to destroy sin, disease, death.
Paul, profoundly metaphysical, saw life and death only as mental conditions, "to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace," that is, the sense of existence as material and organic, originating in dust returns to dust, through its inevitable self destruction; but the spiritual sense is life and peace.
As this divine leaven works in consciousness, it is interesting to note how the thought of longevity is increasing. Most interesting statistics date this marked increase from the year 1875, when Mrs. Eddy's book was given to the world, and we remember Jesus' saying, "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." Not health-laws nor hygiene, but God's law of immortality, harmony, is the regenerating force of the universe.
A strange anomaly greets us in presenting this Science of Being. Christians who have devoutly studied the Bible earnestly, prayerfully, are surprised that we should deny the reality of sin, disease, and death. We do not deny that they are very real to the carnal mind, but as the carnal mind is defined as enmity to God, or Truth, and as the Christ-mind destroys them, they must be the illusion of the material senses.
It is difficult to understand this strange tenacity of our dear brothers and sisters in the churches, in clinging to the false evidence of the material senses in spite of Jesus' teachings and their own beautiful, inspired songs; for the reality of the unseen and eternal is not only in accord with Christianity, but with the thought and teachings of the greatest philosophers and poets who have illumined human genius and progress. It is the Christian's sweetest privilege to look not at the seen and temporal, but at the unseen and eternal. This divine idealism is so powerful that the Apostle Paul declares that it will "change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body." A noted English evangelist has said that the hour has come for Christians to think of transfiguration instead of death, and it seems that we should not forget Paul's further injunction: "Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind."
This is a plain statement of Christian metaphysics, or Christian Science. We have failed to see its exquisite force and metaphysical beauty, because we have not understood the meaning of the word Substance as Paul understood it, and as its true meaning has always been — Substance, that which is the cause of "true phenomena as distinct from the temporal or apparent." A more literal definition of faith is a conviction of unseen realities, and this definition is Christianly scientific. By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death, by faith the walls of Jericho fell down, by faith they subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword; women received their dead raised to life again. If this mental condition called faith is the explanation of all these glorious phenomena, does it not seem that this same conviction or faith should bring about the same results today and should it not characterize all Christians? This faith, as you see, is more than a blind trust, it is the understanding of the infinite, eternal Principle forever governing man by divine, harmonious law.
This divine idealism brings into practical manifestation in the human mind, body, and environment, health and harmony — it reverses material evidence, denies physical causation and turns our gaze and contemplation to the pure ideal in Mind. Must it not be Christian to recognize this ever-present Good — to claim our divine inheritance with Christ and deny all that would rob us of our true heritage from our heavenly Father, no matter what the material evidence may be? This is what Jesus did when he raised the little maid; and when he said "she is not dead, but sleepeth," they laughed him to scorn.
Yet this one thing so clearly taught in the Scriptures and demonstrated by Jesus is the one thing that the materialism of the world finds it so difficult to accept.
We read that the Messiah was to come to judge not by the seeing of the eye, or the hearing of the ear, but to judge righteous judgment. Jesus reproached the Jews, "Ye judge after the flesh," and, Do you judge according to appearances? was Paul's reproach to the Philippians.
The only possible explanation of this glorious healing lies in the Christian Science statement, "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation" (Science and Health).
This one divine Mind embraces within itself all real phenomena. The carnal or sinful human mind expresses itself in matter, in disease, and death, and is the personal sense that Jesus called a lie, liar, and the father of lies. Plato said, "What thou seest, that thou be-est," and the Scriptures say, "As he thinketh in his heart, so is he." Christian Science is the science of divine thinking — thinking Life, thinking Love, thinking Good, thinking health, harmony, joy; and this divine thinking, or knowing God is eternal Life. If this divine thought, or word of Life and Love, will heal in one age it surely will in another; it must be an eternal Christ Science, or knowing Good. Jesus taught so clearly that the wrong thought was as wrong as the wrong act; the act was the manifest thought, the wrong thought or motive is the sin.
Think truly and thy thought
Shall the world's great famine feed.
Live truly and thy life shall be
A grand and noble creed.
The divine thought produces health and harmony; the wrong thought, disease and discord. We thus see that Christian Science healing and teaching is the very foundation-stone of all ethics. Which basis shall we choose? This deep and spiritual sense of the omnipotence of Love and Truth is only reached through practical demonstration. If you will do the will, ye shall know the doctrine; the healing is not the end, it is the means to the end, the divine knowing by proof that Good is All.
It may be interesting to hear of a recent simple case of healing in my own experience. A lovely young girl came to me for treatment of her eyes. She had been in charge of one of the most distinguished oculists of this country for several years, for acute inflammation of the eyes. She could neither read nor go out in the sun, and suffered great pain, so that she always anointed her eyes with opium salve before retiring that she might in that way have surcease from pain. In about three days after coming to me she was perfectly healed, full of joy and gratitude. What did this sweet and gracious work? A deep, abiding conviction of the invisible, indestructible power and presence of eternal Mind or Substance, the perception that man and his faculties are spiritual, not physical.
This newly discovered Christian Science healing, is the very opposite of spiritualism, hypnotism, human psychology, mesmerism. In Christian Science, Truth, God, is the only healer — the realization of Love as ever-present restores to the patient his true harmony in God. Hypnotism is the control of one human mind over another, and leads to great sin and suffering. It is absolutely repudiated by Christian Science. Sometimes in Christian Science, a sweet, overwhelming sense that God is ever-present Love, will heal instantly most difficult cases, and this is the highest form of healing, it enriches the experience of all Christian Science practitioners. I often think if every Christian in the world would heal in Christ's name even one sufferer, how soon the world would be redeemed from sickness and sin through this recognition of our loving Father, able and willing to heal all our diseases as well as forgive our iniquities, as David sang long ago. The kingdom of Good would soon be established, and there would be small need for infirmaries and reformatories; for this understanding of God must come sometime, and it will banish all discord, and reveal the harmony of Being here and now.
If we will follow Jesus' reversals and look up for everything to Him from whom cometh every good and perfect gift, we will find it all here, now, in Mind. In the wilderness of mortal doubt the table is already spread — the waters flow from the rock, the Red Sea is parted for us by the rod of Science.
Our limitations are only the results of our fears and doubts. We really "live, and move, and have our being" in God — the omnipotent Good, Life, and Love, and there is no other being — all else is the mirage, or Adam-dream. To prove this was Jesus' work and must be the work of his followers, or imitators; he rose above every sense of limitation of Life, Love, and Truth and left his wonderful example for us, as our Way-shower, and demonstrator of the problem of being.
Beginning with the simple triumphs over the material evidence of sickness, rebuking the fever, restoring the palsied arm, cleansing the lepers, Jesus took each step in the way of infinite Life, in a constantly ascending scale of demonstration, healing every manner of disease and sin without drugs or hypnotism, but by the power of eternal Truth, saying to every form of evil, God does not know you, for He is omnipotent Good, Mind; therefore you are without Cause or Principle; therefore you are unreal. He applied this divine understanding to every human condition, feeding the multitude by the recognition that Mind makes the harvest, not matter. In Genesis we read that God made "every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew," and there was not a man to till the ground. He revealed true communism in the one Source of supply, the infinite Mind that is no respecter of persons, but impartial in His gifts. Jesus said, "Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest." To know this is to banish the burden of toil. Life and strength are not in nor from the ground, but in Mind — the omnipresent Love. Our birthright as "joint-heirs with Christ" is dominion, not subjection.
To Jesus closed doors were no barrier, when he stood unannounced in the midst of his disciples, for he had learned that Spirit was Substance, not matter. The waves were subject to his declaration of harmony. Even the subtle claim of death he met in ascending stages of demonstration. First the little maid who had just died, then the young man on his way to the burial, when his compassionate tenderness destroyed death itself; then Lazarus, of whom he said "I go, that I may awake him," although he had been dead four days, and every personal sense testified to death and corruption. Then he rolled away the stone from his own grave and rose the victor over hatred, malice, and death, proving the spiritual law of immortality, as Paul said, "Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us," and "nailing it to his cross; and having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly." "Who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light" (to our understanding).
He showed the same body with the cruel prints of the nails, and rose even higher to the acme of spiritual being, dissolving the last remnant of material belief of matter as substance, realizing his absolute unity with pure Spirit, or Mind. Theological vicarious atonement stops at Calvary. Scientific at-one-ment is attained at the ascension. This struggle and attainment of at-one-ment with God was, and is the only truly and completely scientific event of all human history; it stands the one divine achievement and fact toward which all development tends and points.
Standing fixed on the Rock, Christ, the spiritual idea of true, immortal individuality, reflecting the infinity of Life and Love, Jesus met and mastered every limitation of Life and Good as it came personalized to his consciousness — to him the law of Good was God's law to His own creation. Goodness alone is natural to Good, and he proved its power to destroy the claims of evil, Love and its affluence more than meeting human needs. When he fed the multitude, the fragments that remained proved that Mind was truly a multiplier — that no magic deluded those whom he fed from the hand of Love.
Jesus viewed man from the standpoint of Soul, not sense; of Spirit, not matter, and that is the secret of Jesus and of Christian Science.
In absolute metaphysics the Jesus consciousness is that which, recognizing the Fatherhood of Spirit and the divine Sonship, denies the human selfhood, matter and its conditions as the temporal falsities of the human mind, which vanish before the enlightened understanding.
Christian Science to-day, in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" gives to us the absolute Science of Being as Jesus lived and demonstrated it; for the first time the human or mortal mind in its full and final analysis is given to humanity, and its illusions are seen to be the Dead Sea fruit of the "tree of knowledge of Good and evil" — the pantheism that would dethrone Deity. It meets from Christian Science the verdict of Jesus, It's a lie, and a liar from the beginning — and the Truth never was in it.
Good and evil were never in a co-partnership. Good is the only law of Being. Being always was perfect and harmonious, and man never fell from his true estate. John said, "Now are we the sons of God" — Good. Some one will say, some one always does say, "If man was always perfect in God, how did he ever fall into this discordant material condition?" It would be as if some one would ask an astronomer, If the earth now revolves in her orbit around the sun, how did it ever happen that she used to be flat and stationary? The astronomer will say, it was never so, that was only a false sense of it. In the same way we have judged unrighteous judgment of man, because we have judged from the seeing of the eye instead of seeing "not after the flesh," but after the Spirit. To reverse this false estimate of man, and see with the eyes of divine Love that Love and Love's image and likeness is the only reality of existence, to see as Good sees, to love as Love loves, is to redeem the world, and fill it with the radiance of Life, for Love is Life. It was this unselfed sense of Love that gave Jesus his dominion over sin and death; and this reflection of Love will give it to us. This law of Love is God's law of life and health to His children, for He is our health — "the health of my countenance and my God." He is near every one of us, for He is our Life, Principle, Mind. He is our Substance, our Intelligence, and when we know this fully, sin and death will be unknown. Sin alone brings death and disease, the Bible teaches; so the destruction of sin means life and blessedness — immortality.
We speak with pride and great satisfaction of the wonders of the closing century and of the beginning of the new. Each day new marvels greet us, as we see physics rising out of the material to the immaterial, the X-ray, the wireless telegraphy, the constantly ascending evolution of mortal mind out of its old boundaries — reaching out toward the "scientific declaration" that "there is no life, truth, intelligence or substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation" (Science and Health, p. 468). This declaration Jesus proved. Professor Langley, the distinguished Scientist, now tells us that the color is not in the rose, but in us, in our thought. But the real glory that has made all the others possible is this, that in this age has been found one consciousness so clean, so pure from the dross of materialism, that the infinite Science of Soul, which is and always was the All-Science of Celestial Being, has been revealed through her to us.
Even Mrs. Eddy's students, who lovingly follow her leadership, can only faintly grasp the fulness of her sublime mission, but each day unfolds to us more and more the inestimable value of her discovery and her work. A watchful Shepherd over about five hundred Christian Science churches and four thousand students, she stands, a faithful and patient sentinel, keeping guard over a world. A great multitude have been healed through the ministry of her work, and this healing is not only physical, it is the beginning of that spiritual regeneration that ultimates in the freedom of the sons of God. Can words compass the extent of her beneficence, or the far-reaching influence of so sublime and selfless a life? As we see this we feel that we owe no apology to the world for the tender love, gratitude, and ever-increasing admiration that we feel for her, for such lofty spiritual attainment. In the words of England's Christian poet, Tennyson, —
We needs must love the highest best.
The world's greatest humanitarian movement, and its greatest moral reform movements are organized and led by noble, consecrated Christian women. It would seem strange if this vast spiritual movement, which really includes them all, should not be also led by a woman. None other than the one through whom it came could lead it with that matchless wisdom, that characterizes it.
How long has the hope of Christian unity been deferred? Yet in the Christian Science organization each Sunday, every Christian Science congregation in the world, from Australia to Norway, California to Japan, unites in the same lesson sermon, with the same words from the Bible and the same correlated selections, from Science and Health. This absolute unity of thought, uniting in One Mind, one family, all the churches, is even now encircling the earth with the rythmic joy of peace on earth, good-will to men — for the promise is that our words shall not return unto us void, but must accomplish that whereunto they are sent. Christian Science is here calling all into this same unity, — all nations, climes, interests, — into the one Mind that was in Christ Jesus, including all health, holiness, harmony, and life.
That Mind is here now, everywhere; it includes all in the infinite Love — it encompasses all things, the atmosphere of divine Intelligence is the true air in which "we live and move and breathe;" it reveals what "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard."
Immortal Love changeth not. The music of the spheres still chants the eternal harmonies of Being, as when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy. We need only to awake to the realities of Being, and be satisfied as we reflect the divine likeness.
[Published in The Christian Science Journal, October, 1902. A few excessively long paragraphs have been broken up for this transcript.]