Since the year of our Lord 1866, during which time Christian Science has been urging its sublime promptings upon the Christian thought of mankind, it has been dispersing, both by the noiseless processes of patient labor and by the hammer-blows of ringing conviction, the tendency of the human mind to hold the wonderful operations of God's law outside the pale of rationality. As the marvels and miracles wrought by Moses, Elijah, and Christ Jesus were projected against the history of the world, it was not the divine design that human judgment should ever render these signs of God's nearness invalid or perpetually inaccessible to comprehension; nevertheless, they have seemed, throughout the slow file of centuries, to stand like cliffs which, rising suddenly out of a weltering waste of sea, offer no harbor to the wind-blown skiff. Ecclesiastical courts and councils have sent their mariners sailing around them, but they have not yet been reached or traversed by means of dogmatic chart.
Spiritual blindness alone charges the miracles of these great and holy men with being supernormal, when in truth they are found to be wonderful, and wonderful only because they are true. All truth is wonderful, because it is not mystery but revelation. The amazing thing is not always wonderful. Error is amazing, confusing, but truth is wonderful, rational, and enlightening. The "Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world," never shone more divinely than in the teaching of Christ Jesus, yet it is a questionable hospitality which the ages have tendered the true selfhood of him who said, "I am with you alway." This was the last declaration of the presence of the Christ triumphant and perpetual, when, radiant and glorified by the achievement of his greatest miracle, the ascension, the Master proved the sum of sums in his demonstration of life in God. Christian Science provides quick detection of the darnel doctrine which has choked and checked Christian aspiration, separating Jesus' yearning followers from the doing of his mighty works, making of many a heart a dogmatic desert and of the glorious Christ healing a Syrian myth.
To one who has not proven more than the simplest theorem in mathematics it seems wonderful that men have measured such seeming abstractions as air by the foot and steam by the pound, but after the underlying law has been comprehended it grows even more wonderful, because it is no longer amazing but true. As this can only imply the mastery of a higher degree in the scale of comprehension, it is no less wonderful to the child who issues from his infantile ignorance or limitation into the primary degree of mathematical comprehension, and learns that one plus one makes two. This fact may be delineated upon the child's thought by the grouping of apples, but as his material dependence is lessened until it disappears and his possessions become mental, he relinquishes apples for ideas, and the substance of his reckoning is no longer material, but forever metaphysical.
