If Christian Science be what it claims to be and brings what it claims to bring, then it is the promised, invincible deliverer that "shall cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations." For the purpose and promise of Christian Science is to establish righteousness, to eradicate evil, and to enable humanity to realize its ideal. It turns unreservedly to the life and teachings of Jesus for the exemplification of this ideal, and has simply set for itself the task of showing how this ideal is to be made practicable. To show how Christian Science is Christian, how it conserves all the essentials and emphasizes all the ideals of historic Christianity on the one hand; how it reveals a definite, demonstrable method on the other,— in a word, to show how Christian Science is Scientific Christianity, is the purpose of this lecture.
Before considering the merits of Christian Science as a system of thought, the question may arise as to whether these two terms can in any wise be consistently blended; whether to think of Christianity and science as in any sense identical, is not a confusing and confounding of things that inherently differ. For certainly, as we have heretofore conceived their meaning, Christianity and science have stood for two systems of thought differing radically in substance and in method. Perchance the very use of the term Christian Science first came to our hearing with a kind of shock, for science is that which analyzes things; that which classifies, arranges, and measures things. Christianity, on the other hand, has to do with that which is most tender and sacred in human sentiment and experience. The Christ-life finds its birth and its home in the very inner sanctuary of human thought. Now, to think of invading this holy of holies of human consciousness with the methods of science, to undertake to find the analysis and classification and arrangement of the elements that make up the Christ-life, seems at first thought a profanation of something that should be kept forever sacred and apart. It is an insistent feeling that sentiment and science cannot mingle; that there is an inherent contrast or even conflict between the realm of ideals and the realm of law. And yet we remember that every sentiment has its own nature and conditions of birth and being, its own order and method of expression, and therefore its science; and that every ideal embodies in itself the law of its own unfolding. Thus in truth we gain the vision wherein there is a union of these seeming opposites; a union indicated in such words as these of Browning:—
I spake as I saw.
I report, as a man may of God's work, all's love, yet all's law.
