Christian Science has meant to me release from the toils of agnosticism. From the time that I began to reason, I doubted the validity of theologies which were so at variance with my ideal concept of Deity. A God of wrath and vengeance, a God whose sense of justice outweighed His mercy and compassion for struggling humanity, was not a God that I could acknowledge or revere. I could not conceive of a Supreme Being who would permit such an unequal distribution of the good things of life, and then punish the creatures of adverse circumstance for shortcomings which ofttimes were not so much their fault as their misfortune. Such a concept seemed wholly lacking in the elements of common humanity. I delved more or less into various religious teachings, hoping to find some rational explanation of the mystery of life, but they all failed to satisfy, and after a fruitless effort to reconcile reason and revelation on the basis of modern theology. I was forced to conclude that they were irreconcilable. The arguments in general seemed so frail, the reasoning so faulty, that I began to feel that many professing Christians were either bad logicians or hopeless hypocrites. Finally, for want of a better solution, I fell back upon the theory that God is synonymous with nature, and that after death man was resolved back into the elements and ceased to exist as an individual.
While in this skeptical frame of mind, Christian Science was brought to my notice through the healing of a member of my family who had been an invalid for many years. For a long time he had held radical atheistic views, and the fact that he had been led to acknowledge God through Christian Science was more of a wonder to me than was the physical healing. Perhaps it was only a desire to be accounted liberal, perhaps it was an unconscious longing for something beyond my own experience, that led me. on the strength of this evidence, to investigate Christian Science. The first service that I attended was a revelation. The statements read from Science and Health were so logical and unanswerable, so unlike the reasoning of ordinary theology, that before the service had ended I was satisfied that here was an answer to all my doubts and questionings. The solution was so simple and natural that it had been overlooked by the wisdom of the ages. If the goodness, omnipotence, omnipresence, and infinitude of God be accepted as a premise, certainly no rational conclusion could be drawn about evil except that it was unreal, a mortal dream, without entity, power, or permanence. On this basis, God became a Father who could be loved and revered, approached and understood, evil a false sense to be eliminated from daily experience, not a factor to be accepted as inevitable.
This doctrine of the unreality of evil became for me a new foundation from which to work out the problem of life. One by one, discordant conditions are being met and mastered from this great vantage-point, and the impotence of evil, the allness of good demonstrated. The Bible, which before had seemed a bundle of contradictions, now reveals a marvelous unity and consistency, and is a treasure-house of inspiration, a key to the solution of all ethical and moral problems.
But the greatest charm of this new-old religion is not in its theoretical consistency. Christian Science is essentially an applied science, and only through its application to the problems of daily life is its beauty and efficacy fully discerned. It reveals religion no longer as a matter of sentiment, but as a vital, practical issue, and it proves that religion need lose none of the "beauty of holiness" in conforming to scientific methods. The way in Christian Science is not always easy, but the conviction that God is the perfect, unfailing Principle of being, that discord of every kind is the result of our own deviations, never in nor of Him, and that salvation is the process of bringing our lives into accord with Truth, shifts the responsibility for the world's imperfections from God to mankind, and becomes an incentive for activity along the lines of right.
In proportion as the teachings of Christian Science are understood and lived, they are lifting the veil of mystery from life, bridging the gulf between the human and divine, and proving, as a present-day writer has aptly said, that "the supernatural is only the natural not yet understood." Pittsburg, Pa.
