Articles

The narrative of the ministry of our beloved Master as given to us in the four Gospels is much more than the story of a few years in the earthly life of the purest and most Godlike man that ever trod this globe. Every Christian who would be worthy of the name admits that he must take it for his guidance in his daily life, and only as he proves that he is following faithfully in his Master's footsteps can he hope to find the way which leads to eternal Life.

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

While orthodox Christianity admits that the soul of man is immortal and can never die, and that death does not affect the spiritual man, nevertheless the fact that if the real man is immortal and has no ending, he must have had no beginning, has been generally overlooked, although this is taught in Christian Science. We learn, too, in Christian Science that no resurrection awaits the bones and dust that are put away in the grave, but that the resurrection comes hourly and daily, both here and hereafter, and that we are being resurrected when we overcome some sin, or fault of any kind.

Probably no question ever asked is fraught with such profound and universal import to humanity as is the question once put to Jesus by a student of the law in these words: "Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" The question occurs in an incident related in the tenth chapter of Luke's Gospel. Jesus made no direct answer, but by a counter-question drew from the student his own knowledge as to what rule the law prescribed upon the subject of gaining eternal life.

Since the year of our Lord 1866, during which time Christian Science has been urging its sublime promptings upon the Christian thought of mankind, it has been dispersing, both by the noiseless processes of patient labor and by the hammer-blows of ringing conviction, the tendency of the human mind to hold the wonderful operations of God's law outside the pale of rationality. As the marvels and miracles wrought by Moses, Elijah, and Christ Jesus were projected against the history of the world, it was not the divine design that human judgment should ever render these signs of God's nearness invalid or perpetually inaccessible to comprehension; nevertheless, they have seemed, throughout the slow file of centuries, to stand like cliffs which, rising suddenly out of a weltering waste of sea, offer no harbor to the wind-blown skiff.

Out of the deeps of experience come the words of the psalmist: "Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved. " But how many there are whose feelings are being perpetually troubled so that they find no stability nor peace, because they have not yet acknowledged God as the sustaining power.

In the Gospel of Matthew, wherein it is recorded that Jesus addressed the people about him from a hillside in Galilee, the world reads precepts simple and tender in the spirit of their ministration, yet so exalted in ideal that they promise to cut away, in their performance, all the selfish sin of human kind. Among the activities which Jesus defines as blessed by the Father, stands one which speaks great quietness of heart: "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

It is sometimes said by the critics of Christian Science that it is like Neoplatonism and "Berkeleyism," etc. , but these undemonstrable human theories are very different from it, and a patient study of Christian Science enables one to perceive in what way they differ.

Dr. Johnson was doubtless right when he said, "Every man has something to do which he neglects; every man has faults to conquer which he delays to combat.

The question of questions to mankind —the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other —is the ascertainment of the place which man occupies in nature, and of his relation to the universe of things. Whence has our race come? what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature's power over us? to what good are we tending? — these are the problems which present themselves anew and with undiminished interest to every man born into the world.