WE are living in an age of re-arrangement and re-establishment, in science, medicine, and theology. We have reached an hour when long-cherished hopes are being realized. Joy born of the triumph of spiritual Truth over material error fills the hearts of those who are receptive of the advanced idea. To-day is pre-eminent through the fulfilment of prophecy. The world is beginning to experience gratitude towards the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science for her lifelong labors, and to appreciate, though tardily and incompletely, the prophetic nature of many of the statements made by her years ago in her epoch-making book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." Although not receiving encouragement from those particular sources from which she might reasonably have expected it, Mrs. Eddy during all these many years has maintained her position before the world, and is now entering into the joy of seeing her teachings widely accepted.
The changes which are taking place in the theories advanced from time to time by physical science, materia medica, and scholastic theology are so rapid that the public finds it difficult to keep pace with them. Kaleidoscopic reversals of former beliefs would seem to be the order of the day. Thus the atomic theory, which but the other day appeared firmly established as a working hypothesis in physics, designed to account for the formation of all things, has now been so far modified by many prominent investigators of physical phenomena as to threaten its destruction. And yet this already discredited theory continues to underlie the teaching given in our universities and schools, to color the sermons preached from many pulpits, to determine the practice of all schools of material medicine, and even to control legislative enactments passed for the purpose of regulating the practice of medicine.
It was many years ago that Mrs. Eddy with prophetic insight exposed the untenable nature of the atomic-theory philosophy or doctrine, both from a Christian and from a scientific standpoint. Since then a long list of Lesson-Sermons in Christian Science churches, based upon the Bible and the Christian Science text-book, have year by year been laying bare the inadequacy of this theory to account for the origin of the universe. In order to keep abreast of the times, advanced thinkers must study the Scriptures in the light of Science and Health, and learn to discard the superstitions about matter which clog their progress; else their wanderings in the wilderness of human hopes will be unnecessarily prolonged and their struggles towards the light protracted. Indeed the irresistible logic of events is forcing mankind all along the line to abandon outworn concepts concerning the physical universe.
