Miscellaneous Writings - Mary Baker Eddy

Скачать книгу

In adopting all this vast idea of Christ Jesus, the eunuch was to know in whom he believed. To believe thus was to enter the spiritual sanctuary of Truth, and there learn, in divine Science, somewhat of the All-Father-Mother God. It was to understand God and man: it was sternly to rebuke the mortal belief that man has fallen away from his first estate; that man, made in God's own likeness, and reflecting Truth, could fall into mortal error; or, that man is the father of man. It was to enter unshod the Holy of Holies, where the miracle of grace appears, and where the miracles of Jesus had their birth—healing the sick, casting out evils, and resurrecting the human sense to the belief ​that Life, God, is not buried in matter. This is the spiritual dawn of the Messiah, and the overture of the angels. This is when God is made manifest in the flesh, and thus it destroys all sense of sin, sickness, and death—when the brightness of His glory encompasseth all being.

      Can Christian Science Mind-healing be taught to those who are absent?

      The Science of Mind-healing can no more be taught thus, than can science in any other direction. I know not how to teach either Euclid or the Science of Mind silently; and never dreamed that either of these partook of the nature of occultism, magic, alchemy, or necromancy. These “ways that are vain” are the inventions of animal magnetism, which would deceive, if possible, the very elect. We will charitably hope, however, that some people employ the et cetera of ignorance and self-conceit unconsciously, in their witless ventilation of false statements and claims. Misguiding the public mind and taking its money in exchange for this abuse, has become too common: we will hope it is the froth of error passing off; and that Christian Science will some time appear all the clearer for the purification of the public thought concerning it.

       Has man fallen from a state of perfection?

      If God is the Principle of man (and He is), man is the idea of God; and this idea cannot fail to express the exact nature of its Principle—any more than goodness, to present the quality of good. Human hypotheses are always human vagaries, formulated views antagonistic ​to the divine order and the nature of Deity. All these mortal beliefs will be purged and dissolved in the crucible of Truth, and the places once knowing them will know them no more forever, having been swept clean by the winds of history. The grand verities of Science will sift the chaff from the wheat, until it is clear to human comprehension that man was, and is, God's perfect likeness, that reflects all whereby we can know God. In Him we live, move, and have being. Man's origin and existence being in Him, man is the ultimatum of perfection, and by no means the medium of imperfection. Immortal man is the eternal idea of Truth, that cannot lapse into a mortal belief or error concerning himself and his origin: he cannot get out of the focal distance of infinity. If God is upright and eternal, man as His likeness is erect in goodness and perpetual in Life, Truth, and Love. If the great cause is perfect, its effect is perfect also; and cause and effect in Science are immutable and immortal. A mortal who is sinning, sick, and dying, is not immortal man; and never was, and never can be, God's image and likeness, the true ideal of immortal man's divine Principle. The spiritual man is that perfect and unfallen likeness, coexistent and coeternal with God. “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”

      What course should Christian Scientists take in regard to aiding persons brought before the courts for violation of medical statutes?

      Beware of joining any medical league which in any way obligates you to assist—because they chance to be under arrest—vendors of patent pills, mesmerists, ​occultists, sellers of impure literature, and authors of spurious works on mental healing. By rendering error such a service, you lose much more than can be gained by mere unity on the single issue of opposition to unjust medical laws.

      A league which obligates its members to give money and influence in support and defense of medical charlatans in general, and possibly to aid individual rights in a wrong direction—which Christian Science eschews—should be avoided. Anybody and everybody, who will fight the medical faculty, can join this league. It is better to be friendly with cultured and conscientious medical men, who leave Christian Science to rise or fall on its own merit or demerit, than to affiliate with a wrong class of people.

      Unconstitutional and unjust coercive legislation and laws, infringing individual rights, must be “of few days, and full of trouble.” The vox populi, through the providence of God, promotes and impels all true reform; and, at the best time, will redress wrongs and rectify injustice. Tyranny can thrive but feebly under our Government. God reigns, and will “turn and overturn” until right is found supreme.

      In a certain sense, we should commiserate the lot of regular doctors, who, in successive generations for centuries, have planted and sown and reaped in the fields of what they deem pathology, hygiene, and therapeutics, but are now elbowed by a new school of practitioners, outdoing the healing of the old. The old will not patronize the new school, at least not until it shall come to understand the medical system of the new.

      Christian Science Mind-healing rests demonstrably on ​the broad and sure foundation of Science; and this is not the basis of materia medica, as some of the most skilful and scholarly physicians openly admit.

      To prevent all unpleasant and unchristian action—as we drift, by right of God's dear love, into more spiritual lines of life—let each society of practitioners, the matter-physicians and the metaphysicians, agree to disagree, and then patiently wait on God to decide, as surely He will, which is the true system of medicine.

      Do we not see in the commonly accepted teachings of the day, the Christ-idea mingled with the teachings of John the Baptist? or, rather, Are not the last eighteen centuries but the footsteps of Truth being baptized of John, and coming up straightway out of the ceremonial (or ritualistic) waters to receive the benediction, of an honored Father, and afterwards to go up into the wilderness, in order to overcome mortal sense, before it shall go forth into all the cities and towns of Judea, or see many of the people from beyond Jordan? Now, if all this be a fair or correct view of this question, why does not John hear this voice, or see the dove—or has not Truth yet reached the shore?

      Every individual character, like the individual John the Baptist, at some date must cry in the desert of earthly joy; and his voice be heard divinely and humanly. In the desolation of human understanding, divine Love hears and answers the human call for help; and the voice of Truth utters the divine verities of being which deliver mortals out of the depths of ignorance and vice. This is the Father's benediction. It gives lessons to human life, guides the understanding, peoples ​the mind with spiritual ideas, reconstructs the Judean religion, and reveals God and man as the Principle and idea of all good.

      Understanding this fact in Christian Science, brings the peace symbolized by a dove; and this peace floweth as a river into a shoreless eternity. He who knew the foretelling Truth, beheld the forthcoming Truth, as it came up out of the baptism of Spirit, to enlighten and redeem mortals. Such Christians as John cognize the symbols of God, reach the sure foundations of time, stand upon the shore of eternity, and grasp and gather—in all glory—what eye hath not seen.

      Is there infinite progression with man after the destruction of mortal mind?

      Man is the offspring and idea of the Supreme Being, whose law is perfect and infinite. In obedience to this law, man is forever unfolding the endless beatitudes of Being; for he is the image and likeness of infinite Life, Truth, and Love.

      Infinite progression is concrete being, which finite mortals see and comprehend only as abstract glory. As mortal mind, or the material sense of life, is put off, the spiritual sense and Science of being is brought to light.

      Mortal mind is a myth; the one Mind is immortal. A mythical or mortal sense of existence is consumed as a moth, in the treacherous glare of its own flame—the errors which devour it. Immortal Mind is God, immortal good; in whom the Scripture saith “we live, and move, and have our being.” This Mind, then, is not subject to growth, change, or diminution, but is the divine ​intelligence, or Principle, of all real being; holding man forever in the rhythmic round of unfolding bliss, as a living witness to and perpetual idea of inexhaustible good.

Скачать книгу