Perhaps no term in the English language has been more misapplied than the word transcendental. The hour has come for its true meaning and value to be revealed, for its rescue from the false sense that it applies to what is visionary, unreal, and impracticable. The human mind to-day is awakening through Christian Science from its grosser" materialism, and, passing from the finite towards the infinite, is reaching out for higher definitions.
In her broad grasp of things, our Leader gives due credit to the labors of philosophers as well as physicists in their work of enlarging the human mind and breaking its limitations. Throughout the centuries what has been called transcendentalism has rarefied human thought, for it brought glorious glimpses of a spiritual reality; but not reaching conviction and not understanding Mind as the only causation and power, it was shorn of practical value to humanity. Mrs. Eddy, by her spiritual discovery of the Science of Mind, has gathered the illumination of all the ages into one grand sunburst of light, and just as physical science has utilized the electrical forces to dispel material darkness, so Christian Science, in its pure and logical statement that infinite Spirit manifests itself in its own perfect likeness, in spiritual ideas, is dispelling the mists and myths of mortal thought, and thus reducing to nothingness the illusions of discord and disease and bringing to light Life and immortality. Christian Science is Christianity. It is redemptive, not destructive; it restores the true sense of all things. .
The dictionaries furnish the following definitions of "transcendental": "Of very high degree; transcending all ordinary or specified bounds;" "Transcendental truths are simply those necessary, self-evident, axiomatic truths which transcend experience" "The character of transcendental excellence. A word used in Shelling's explanation of the universe and material things to indicate a mode of mental conception." Dr. Channing says, "Transcendentalism as viewed by Jesus' disciples was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the living God in the Soul."
