For many years I was a member of an orthodox church, and a great part of the time I was a devoted student of the Bible, but during certain periods when I was consciously continuing in sin, I was unable to read it. The deep, metaphysical parts had appealed to me most strongly, and upon my coming to Christian Science, it awakened in me a hope for early and complete freedom from all the impediments of the flesh. Life, untrammeled by dependence upon material things, had seemed to me the thing to be desired, the thing vaguely held out in the Scriptures; but it was not until Christian Science came to me that this appeared to be the lively hope, begotten in the disciples, for present realization, by the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, their Teacher and the Messenger of Truth to the whole world. The very reverence with which I had approached his words, and the search for the deep meaning, had seemed to obscure from me the simplest signification of both his words and acts.
I had read and re-read the Gospel of Mark, where it is plainly stated that those who heard and understood his teaching, through the teaching of his followers, should do the things that Jesus did; yet I had never really heard these words. I was closed to the simple truth contained in them. Now I see that this is one of the cardinal points of the gospel which the Master taught. Throughout the whole world and to the end of time, whoever hears and understands and heeds the words of Jesus, will be able to do the things that he did. Either this is true or his statements are false; and no one who dares to take his name can repudiate as false any statement which he made. It is the privilege of each student of Christian Science, through the teaching of its Discoverer, Mrs. Eddy, to demonstrate the truth of this and of the other statements made by Jesus, and by so doing to preach the gospel which he preached.
Christian people, as a rule, have formed only a vague idea as to the meaning of the word "gospel." The four books written by four of the disciples have monopolized the word, and people have not taken the trouble to go further and ascertain what Jesus meant by this word "gospel," which he began to use at the very outset of his ministry, before the things were done which are recorded by the disciples and which as recorded are called the Gospels. Manifestly he meant something by the word gospel besides the record of what he did. The good news which Jesus came to preach, and which is the gospel, was nothing more nor less than complete deliverance from all the claims of the flesh, beginning with deliverance from its abnormal conditions manifested in sickness, or in sensuality in its grossest and most repellant forms, and proceeding to the final conquest over every vestige of the "carnal mind." This so-called mind is not that of the gross sensualist simply, as has been thought in the past; it is that which recognizes and acknowledges a false material sense of life, a belief which, because material, is subject to disease, decay, and death. This is the mind that is enmity against God, against the unalterable fact of one Mind, spiritual, incorruptible; manifested in all that gospel which Jesus preached, and proved to be true by overcoming all forms of sickness and sin.
