Time was when men accepted nature for what it seemed. The world was flat, and things were made up of earth, air, fire, water, etc., as any one might see. This matter-of-fact view was greatly modified by the logic of Hebrew monotheism, which brought to men an abiding sense of unity and gave rise to the concept of one omnipresent Cause and Creator.
A further advance in the thought of nature was effected by the demonstration and acceptance of the heliocentric order of the universe. Then men saw as never before the sweep and all-inclusiveness of law, and so they were led to the adoption of the Baconian attitude of inquiry and experimentation respecting so-called natural phenomena. Nevertheless, in all the Christian centuries physical nature has remained an insoluble mystery, not only in the sense that many of its processes and operations are beyond human ken, but in that they are inexplicable, the manifestations of a seemingly blind force which works its will in subtle, unintelligible ways.
The universe is a riddle to the atheist, who declares that all causation is to be found in the potentialities of matter; and it is no less a riddle to the Christian materialist, who thinks of matter as the inert and senseless, but divinely provided means by which a sovereign will is expressed. In the one case the mystery inheres in the asserted fact that what is affirmed to be unintelligent, mindless, mere stuff, is able in its evolutions to generate thought and express itself in ways and forms which suggest an infinity of wisdom and beauty. In the other case the mystery inheres in the asserted fact that He who is declared to be all-wise, all-loving, and all-powerful has instituted and maintains an order of things which involve unspeakable conflict, injustice, suffering, and wrong.
The tone of hopelessness, and sadness withal, to which this sense of the inscrutability of nature lends itself, was discovered by a recent writer in Putnam's Magazine. He says: "I seized the opportunity, some little while ago, on finding myself sitting next to a great physicist, of asking him a series of fumbling questions on the subject of modern theories of matter. For an hour I stumbled like a child, supported by a strong hand, in a dim and unfamiliar world, among the mysterious essences of things. I should like to try to reproduce it here, but I have no doubt I should reproduce it all wrong. Still, it was deeply inspiring to look out into chaos, to hear the rush and motion of atoms moving in vast vortices, to learn that inside the hardest and most impenetrable of substances there was probably a feverish intensity of inner motion. I do not know that I acquired any precise knowledge, but I drank deep drafts of wonder and awe.
"The great man, with his amused and weary smile, was infinitely gentle, and left me, I will say, far more conscious of the beauty and the holiness of knowledge. I said something to him about the sense of power that such knowledge must give. `Ah,' he said, 'much of what I have told you is not proved; it is only suspected. We are very much in the dark about these things yet. Probably if a physicist of a hundred years hence could overhear me he would be amazed to think that a sensible man could make such puerile statements. Power—no, it is not that! It rather makes one realize one's feebleness in being so uncertain about things that are absolutely certain and precise in themselves, if we could but see the truth. It is much more like the apostle who said, "Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief." The thing one wonders at is the courage of the men who dare to think they know.'".
This frank acknowledgment of ignorance where there is accredited wisdom,— that the discoveries of the future are likely to make the present assertedly scientific seem puerile, —does not surprise the Christian Scientist, for he has learned that a material sense of the universe and its phenomena is neither intelligent nor intelligible. Recognizing the falsity of the world's material concept of things, its inscrutability becomes to him a matter of course. Having no Principle, no divine law, it must vary with the mortal belief of which it is an expression. It does not pertain to Mind and cannot express it. The Mind forces which theology has declared to be inherent in matter, are and can but be wholly spiritual, since God, Spirit, is their source, and it is the province of Christian Science thus to identify them even as it identifies man, and to maintain their unsullied divinity forever separate from every suggestion of materiality. Says our Leader, "Spirit is the life, substance, and continuity of all things. We tread on forces. Withdraw them, and creation must collapse. Human knowledge calls them forces of matter; but divine Science declares that they belong wholly to divine Mind, are inherent in this Mind, and so restores them to their rightful home and classification" (Science and Health, p. 124).
The teaching of Christian Science that there is nothing mysterious, unknowable, or unintelligible in true being, the realm of the real, is likely to be challenged by the statement that the mystery of the divine manifestation is frequently referred to by the sacred writers, as in the case of Paul's definite statement to Timothy, "Without controversy great is the mystery of godliness." In answer it may be said that the Greek word mustcrion, translated "mystery" in this and twenty-six other passages of the New Testament, comes from a root which means to initiate, and links thought to the time when the symbolic significance of religious rites, upon which the mass of the people looked with superstitious awe, was understood only by the priestly class, the initiated. The Elusinian mysteries of the Greeks, and the older religious rites of the Egyptians, which figure prominently in George Eber's writings respecting "The Land of the Ancient River," were mysterious only to the ignorant, but, as Mark Hopkins has said, "there may be ignorance without mystery," and as ordinarily used in the New Testament this word "mystery" stands for those divine truths which may not yet be apprehended by human sense, but which are apprehensible in Christ. To the twelve Jesus said, "It is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them [that are without] it is not given." In his letter to the Corinthians Paul speaks of ministers of Christ as "stewards of the mysteries of God," and to the Romans he writes of the revelation in Jesus Christ of "the mystery, which was kept secret [from the ignorant and unbelieving] since the world began,"—all of which makes clear the teaching of Christian Science, that the truths of being are not mysterious, save to the uninitiated, those who have not attained to the Mind which was in Christ Jesus. In two or three instances this same word musterion is used in a secondary sense by Scripture writers to denote the nature of evil, materiality,— that which is without principle, and hence without law. (See 2 Thessalonians, 2: 7, and Revelation, 17: 5, 7.)
Christian Science teaches that while the products of material sense, the phenomena of physical nature, so called, are and must forever remain inscrutable, a mystery, because forever separated from the Divine intelligence, there is no mystery— unintelligibility, unknowableness— in the truths of being, in so far as we have attained to spiritual-mindedness. The manifestations of infinite Mind are indeed wonderful, "past finding out" as yet, since "to understand God is the work of eternity" (Science and Health p. 3); but "all things are naked and opened [intelligible, logical, law-expressive] unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do," and to all those who have awakened "in his likeness."
In separating between the nature which manifests Mind and the so-called nature of material sense, Christian Science, the word of Truth, pierces even to the dividing asunder of soul (human sense) and Spirit. It uncovers the mystery of evil, matter and the asserted laws of material belief, which result in sin, sickness, and death, and reveals the radiant realm of God's appointing, to the knowledge of which, with all its triumph and peace, we may each through Christ attain.
