As recorded in the fifteenth chapter of St. John, Jesus said, "If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you .... He that hateth me hateth my Father also. If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father. But this cometh to pass, that the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law, They hated me without cause."
Has not this Scripture been recently fulfilled?
For many years the Rev. Mary Baker Eddy has been the target of violent attacks from persons whom she has loved and aided in every way she could. Others who do not know her have poured out the vials of their wrath upon her; and for what? What has she done to justify such treatment? She has devoted the better part of her life to the unselfish and sacred work of uplifting the human race, and teaching it, out of Holy Writ, how to save itself from sickness, sorrow, sin, and death. She has been doing the very work that the Founder of the Christian religion declared his followers should do; and for this she has been stoned; for this she has been hated without cause, as Jesus and his disciples were. He declared that those who hated him hated his Father also. He did not mean this in the merely personal sense. Had he said those who hate my teachings and my practice because they are a rebuke to human wickedness and sin, and yet they know the Father is my guide and patron, he would only more fully have stated his meaning. Had he added: And all who may hereafter teach and practise as I now teach and practise, will be hated without a cause, as I am, he would only have enlarged his saying, for that is just what he meant.
