Between the miraculous works of production," reproduction, and healing, performed by the prophets, by Jesus, and his disciples, and the utility of these works to all races for whose redemption they were performed, theology leaves much unreconciled. Its most familiar claim to incompatibility to-day, lies in a remonstrance that the works of Jesus were for a peculiar people of a peculiar period, leaving to the modern disciple, if it were possible, only the wind-shaken reed of Scriptural figure, without the vital, scientific fact.
If it be true that Jesus' healing work ended with his day, then it should be also logically true that the change of estate brought about by the powerful action of the Continental Congress passed with the passing of the people of 'Seventy-six, and the dispensation of civil American freedom cannot extend over future ages to those who are destined to gather upon America's liberty-lighted shores. If, with the passing of time, there is now no mighty truth and no divine promise left in the statement, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly," then the time approaches when the Declaration of Independence must become a whimsical piece of archaic literature, whose good blessed only the Colonists who were living when it was proclaimed.
The Christian Science denomination does not spring from a common and careless view of Jesus' ministry, nor does the present powerful democracy of the American nation flourish upon the supposition that the Declaration of Independence is outworn cant. On the contrary, all rediscerned truth brings to the claimant a wider adaptation of its Principle, whether for spiritual or for economic ends. If there are more laudable reasons for setting aside the right of Jesus' followers to do as he commanded, they are buried in the euphemistic silence of scholastic theology, or given over to the decisions of the riotous lay imagination. As carelessly framed statutes sometimes disfranchise innocent and helpless citizens, so theological invention curtails the capacity of the human mind not trained to find its way to Christ Like a row of asterisks upon an otherwise fair, well-written page, separating conclusion from climax and leaving the vital truth untold, the grandiloquence of human opinions has brought disuse and mystery upon the Scriptures. Now, singing in the new tongue the sweet gospel of Christ, Christian Science comes, striking out the asterisks of scorn, fear, ignorance, and hate, and from the font of divine Mind fills the pause in the page with words of gold.
