Editorials

It is invariably true that every vital uncompromising statement of divine truth proves to be both an inspiration and an offense. Illuminating and corrective, it comes to confirm the intuitions, the spiritual visions of those who have loved the truth for its own sake, and who, have awakened to the deadening effect upon the higher life of unquestioning devotion to forms and creeds.

One of the most vital utterances of Christ Jesus was his declaration to the Samaritan woman that as God is Spirit, He must be worshiped "in spirit and in truth. " This was said to one who evidently thought that moral delinquencies could be covered up by a certain amount of religious knowledge and observance of outward forms, but it is also evident that she was ready for something better; that she was actually hungering for the spirituality which was then offered her by one who was ever ready to prove the truth of his words.

Jesus' declaration, "They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick," is often cited as proof that he believed in the efficacy of material means, yet in the light of his own practise and the rule laid down for his followers in all ages, this is but a figure of speech, explained in the sentence which immediately follows: "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. " It was through the power of Spirit, "the finger of God," that he healed those who, believing, came or were brought to him, it mattered not by what name the physicians of that day had diagnosed the disease.

IN the epistle of James we find several admonitions as to faith and patience and their close relation to each other. He begins by saying: "The trying of your faith worketh patience;" and he adds, "Let patience have her perfect work.

THE world is indebted to physical science for two most important lessons, namely, that all law is to be verified by practical demonstration, and that we command, are able to utilize, law in the measure that we obey it. The goal of the spiritual life is the apprehension of divine law by each one for himself.

THERE is an old adage to the effect that there is no royal road to learning. He who would gain other than a superficial knowledge of any subject must, be he of high or low degree from the worldly standpoint, work out his own salvation, must acquire a demonstrable knowledge of its fundamental truths, and then proceed to put them to the test, prove by his fruits the genuineness of his growth.

THE two most prominent presentations upon the stage of human experience are those of life and death, which, while thought of as forever at war and in a sense mutually exclusive, have nevertheless been classed together, even in Christian faiths, as having equally legitimate parts in the divinely ordered human program. Christian Science teaches that the one infinite Life in its omnipresent and ceaseless continuity leaves no place whatever for death, which is therefore neither to be consented to nor feared.

AS the result of many years' experience, Mrs. Eddy tells us that "the literal rendering of the Scriptures makes them nothing valuable, but often is the foundation of unbelief and hopelessness" (Miscellaneous Writings, p.

IF proof were wanting of the unreality of evil, the fallaciousness of its asserted claims to place and power, we need but recall that from the beginning it has promised that which it could not fulfil, has tried to delude even itself with the belief that it could in some way circumvent omnipotence. But from the time it beguiled the dwellers in the garden of Eden with that seductive phrase, "Ye shall be as gods;" when it promised Jesus the pomp and glory of the kingdoms of this world if he would but fall down and worship it; until today, when it would persuade mortals that the lusts of the flesh, the pride of place and power, are more to be desired than the love of God,—in each and every instance evil has contracted for what it could not deliver, because evil, or the devil, as Jesus declared, "is a liar, and the father of it;" "and abode not in the truth.

At the close of Paul's first epistle to Timothy we find this solemn warning to his young student: "O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called. " The master Christian himself had made it clear that the right kind of knowledge (which is always science) is indispensable to human progress; that the knowing of the truth makes free from evil of every sort, as he proved by his healing ministry for mankind, and to lose sight of the Science of being would mean the greatest misfortune which could befall the race.