Christian Scientists are often heard to express deep gratitude for the help, the inspiration, and the comfort they receive from the rehearsal of the spiritual experiences of other Christian Scientists. The honest seeker after Truth is sure to find in the experiences of other seekers after Truth many conditions and circumstances directly parelleling or strikingly analogous to his own experiences. Perceiving that he has so much in common with his fellow-man, one awakes to the consciousness that he really understands his brother. The natural product of this understanding is loving sympathy, and loving sympathy brings with it the more than recompense of enabling one to profit by the lessons that one's fellows, wittingly or unwittingly, teach.
When we have sufficiently lifted the thraldom of personality to be able to compare justly our mental experiences with those of our fellows, we see that the spiritual growth of every individual is along practically the same lines. Men and women come, it is true, from worldly surroundings that differ widely in detail and in degree. Yet the spiritual experiences through which these individuals pass in outgrowing their dissimilar material phases, are essentially the same in every instance. Thought, motive, and conviction are unmistakably paralleled. This is a logical and, indeed, an inevitable circumstance; for all, who, with perception quickened by the touch of the Supreme Good, are sincerely trying to solve scientifically the life problem, are earnestly striving for a higher understanding of the One Mind. Their purpose is the same, and their method is the same. It follows as a matter of course that their experiences and the results they obtain are ultimately the same. One must regard this fact, testified to by Christian Scientists time and time again, as at least strongly corroborative of man's unity as the perfect expression of the perfect God. Certainly this unity must be acknowledged to be actual and not merely theoretical, when the evidence of its positiveness and its vitality is found to be not in any way peculiar to the present day and generation. Knowing God as without "variableness, neither shadow of turning," we likewise must know man, the image and likeness of God, as unchanged from the beginning.
The mountain peak of the Old Testament is Moses, commissioned leader and law-giver of the descendants of that Abraham with whom God made a covenant. Moses lived, according to the generally accepted Biblical chronology, some sixteen hundred years before Christ. The offspring of a nomad Oriental people, he grew up in the midst of the strange civilization of ancient Egypt. Surely, if heredity and environment could affect the spiritual man, Moses would be as different from modern man as the Darwinian ape is from the learned evolutionist who lectures about him. If Moses' spiritual manhood had been the outcome of material conditions, the spiritual significance of his career and the motive thought-force of his activity would be inexplicable enigmas to us of to-day, living as we do under wholly different material conditions. What are the facts?
