THE word evolution, with which modem science has made us familiar, has undergone such a dramatic reversal of fortunes as to give it almost a romantic flavor. A generation ago it was regarded as having a particularly emphatic irreligious meaning, because it was thought to show that anything like an all-wise creator or a rational purpose in the world was quite unnecessary or doubtful. In time, however, the word came to be seen as truly religious in its import; for the fundamental conviction of religion always is that man's destiny is under the guidance of a divine purpose, moving toward some great end; and evolution, even at its lowest terms, always reveals an intelligent purpose, unfolding, according to a progressive rational law, toward some great end.
But more especially it is the Bible that gives to the idea of evolution the sacred meaning of a divine providence. The purpose of God unfolds from the promise of grace, through the law and the prophets, to fulfilment in the glorious Messiah, who brings to light the dispensation of the divine Son, and establishes the kingdom of God on earth. To explain himself and his gospel to his contemporaries, Jesus pointed back over the past and declared that it all looked forward to, and prepared the way for, his coming. He abolished nothing that was real, but brought the true meaning that lay hidden in the past to full expression.
But if Jesus thus fulfilled the past, he inaugurated a new, progressive, historical development for the future. His gospel was like leaven that was to spread throughout the entire lump, or like the seed that was to develop into the blade, then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear. It was to be an unfoldment of the truth in the consciousness of men, moving toward the dispensation of the divine Spirit; and the entire development of Christian history has been under the guidance of the ideals which Jesus presented in his gospel.
But it would be a grave misunderstanding to suppose that the gospel is the only formative element in Christian history. For when it was brought, by the great apostle Paul, into contact with the prevailing world of GraecoRoman culture, it had to meet and adjust itself to the Hellenic forms of cultured thought. Before the gospel could be accepted by the world, it had to be explained and interpreted in a way to satisfy its intelligence, as it had been developed in Greek philosophy. In time, there resulted those great doctrines of the Church in which the Hebrew ethical and the Hellenic intellectual elements were united, to form a new type of consciousness, which was higher and more advanced than either the Hebrew or Greek lay itself, because it combined them both, or because, as Clement of Alexandria declared, the gospel was recognized as the fulfilment of the past progressive tendencies, not only in Hebrew history, but also in Greek history,—Plato as well as Moses was looked upon as a precursor of Christ.
The great significance and comprehensiveness of Christianity is due to this historical confluence, in the early centuries of our era, of these two main streams of culture into a broader stream that was to bear mankind on to their destiny in time. The Hebrew ethical genius, culminating in the gospel, interpreted God as eternal goodness, and so regarded the chief aim of life to be willing the will of God, or being a saint. The Hellenic intellectual genius, on the other hand, culminating in the highest forms of philosophy, interpreted God as infinite Truth, and so regarded the chief aim of life to be thinking the thought of God, or being a scientist. In consequence, we always find the Hebrew repenting of his sins, as the source of evil, and turning to goodness, as the only ground of salvation and life; while we find the Greek denying his errors, as the source of evil, and seeking Truth as the only ground of beauty and happiness.
Unless we see that both of these elements, ethical and intellectual, rational and explanatory, were combined to form the Christian consciousness, we shall not understand the significance and progressive historical development of Christianity as a whole. When men once recognize that their vocation is to be both saints and scientists, that they must think true as well as will right, they have made a great advance, however undeveloped they may be, over those who are content with trying to be saints, or trying to be scientists, however developed they may be. The least Christian is far greater than the greatest Hebrew or Greek; for, however humble he may be as personally compared with either, his inherent aim combines both, in that he is no longer content simply to will God's will, or simply to think God's thought, but he understands that, to escape evil and attain salvation, he must not only strive to will God's will, but also to think God's thought.
Thus, for example, if the will of God is revealed to us that we should love our neighbor as ourselves, we can only really do so when we come to think God's thought about our neighbor. So long as we think mortal thoughts about him, he will remain unlovable, and we shall find it practically impossible to carry out God's will toward him of loving him as ourselves. But when we think God's thought about him, strive to see him as God sees man, then we can really will the will of God toward him, and love him as ourselves. This true thinking about others Jesus constantly urged upon his disciples. He taught them to think of others as the children of God, and to act accordingly.
But although this union between our ethical and scientific interests was effected in the early Church, it remained incomplete and immature, or incomplete because it was immature. The reason for this incompleteness and immaturity is not far to seek. Men lived under a dualistic view of the world. It was believed that down here in a material world, vitiated by all sorts of evil, was man; while up there, in a supernatural, spiritual world, was God, amid light and blessedness. It is true that the supernatural occasionally interposed in the course of the material world to correct its evils; but for the most part it was left to run its own independent course, and men had to get along as best they could, with the hope, or confident faith, that death would finally release them from the evils to which they were subject, to enter upon the happiness of spiritual existence in the supernatural world.
Yet, to attain this release and ultimate salvation, men must always meet the two conditions, ethical and scientific, of willing God's will and thinking God's thought. To do so, the truly pious, seeing no way of practically realizing God's kingdom on earth, felt themselves called upon to desert the world, by withdrawing to some lonely cell or monastic seclusion, where, subduing the flesh with ascetic austerities, they might contemplate the spiritual realities to be enjoyed after death. For the most part, however, men must live in the world, where the only means of willing God's will and thinking God's thought came to be regarded as observing the rites of the Church and believing the true doctrine. No one could presume to understand the doctrine, for it was a mystery, but all could believe it as the truth, and, believing it, be saved.
While there were always men who had much deeper and truer views of goodness and truth, yet this sort of formal ethical and intellectual externalism was the prevailing consciousness throughout the Middle Ages; and indeed is, unfortunately, the prevailing consciousness in many minds to-day. But since the Church always made the fundamental demand of willing God's will and thinking God's thought, it was inevitable that the Christian consciousness should unfold to a higher stage of expression. And this it did in those two great movements that inaugurated our modern era, the Reformation and the Renaissance. The Reformation brought out chiefly the ethical or Hebrew element in the Christian consciousness, and stood distinctly for religion. Its great significance for us is the fact that it restored to man his individual moral worth, by bringing him face to face with God and his fellow-men. This was the meaning of Jesus; and is the only ground for the kingdom of God on earth. It has been, therefore, the inspiration of all social advance, all progress in civil liberty, and the basis for a free government of the people, by the people, and for the people, whereby men, as the equal children of God, live according to the law of universal good will.
But if the Reformation thus brought to a better expression the Hebrew ethical element in the Christian consciousness, or the necessity of willing God's will, it failed to develop the meaning of the Hellenic scientific element, equally wrapped up in it, or to show how to think God's thought. For the reformers, still living under the old dualistic views of the natural and supernatural, the material and the spiritual, simply furbished up the old abstract doctrines to meet their needs. They still held that faith in the incomprehensible, supra-rational creed was the way to think God's thought, and gain salvation after death.
Unfortunately—or fortunately—the individual rational freedom, involved in the Reformation, necessarily opened the way to the growing scientific spirit of the age, and resulted in great confusion and doubt concerning the creeds. In consequence, just as the Church of ritual had to give way before the Reformation, so the Protestant Church of dogma had to move forward to a higher expression of its inner life. Three distinct attitudes toward dogma showed themselves. One class of men held to the conservative orthodoxy of medievalism: the creed is supra-rational, or entirely beyond the questions of reason, and must be believed to win salvation. This attitude, however, no longer makes an appeal to the modern mind.
A second class of men, recognizing the inefficiency of the creed, took their stand upon the deed. The one thing needful is not to think God's thought, but to will God's will, and the only creed is the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Under this view, religion constantly threatens to degenerate into a vague humanitarian sentimentality; and the persistent fact is overlooked, that man is just as intellectual as he is moral, and that he must think true as well as will right. Men must know God as well as love God; for in reality their being able to will right depends upon their thinking true, just as much as their thinking true depends upon their willing right. While theologians of this second class are characterized by an alluring tolerance, far more attractive to the modern mind than the crabbed and dogmatic orthodoxy of the first class, their position nevertheless is weak and one-sided, and wholly incapable of expressing the full significance of the Christian consciousness.
A third class of men, however, have struck out along a truer path of advance. Seeing clearly enough that the old dogmatic forms were quite inadequate for the modern age, they recognized that it was necessary just the same to have a true doctrine, or try to think the thought of God. So that, instead of dropping the creed altogether as useless and indifferent, they have bravely set themselves the task of finding its inherent truth and giving to it a higher and more dynamic spiritual meaning. But, as eminently right as their effort has been, they have not succeeded, because they have not caught the meaning of that other great movement of our modern era, the Renaissance. Still under the dualistic sway, they think to form a coherent theoretical conception of truth, without understanding its dynamic power in the transformation of life.
Such a dynamic power of truth the Renaissance introduced; for, being the revival of the Hellenic scientific element in the Christian consciousness, it led men to seek a clear explanation and understanding of things, with the profound practical conviction, which Bacon so admirably voiced, that knowledge is not simply knowledge, but also demonstrable power. Men came to see that the medieval view of nature, which regarded the evils of human existence as due either to the maleficent influences of satanic badness or the beneficent impositions of divine goodness, was entirely false; because, as they earnestly sought to know the ways of nature and obey her dictates, such evils began to disappear, as having had their origin solely in human ignorance, error, and superstition. Indeed, the very forces of evil that had been regarded as either the work of diabolical malice or deific benevolence, came to be transformed into useful, wonder-working servitors of man. In a word, in proportion as men gave up their false opinions and beliefs about nature, and sought really to understand its laws, such treasures and blessings as they had never dreamed of before were poured out upon them.
It seemed as if science were going to enable man, for the first time in history, to obey the original divine command: Have dominion over the earth. But, alas, the expectation of mastery thus aroused is at once shattered by science itself; for science declares that it knows only appearances, or phenomena, and that while it can provide us with any number of material opportunities, it can say nothing of spiritual reality, in which our ultimate interests lie, except that it can never be known. Reason in the end refuses to be satisfied with mere appearances, and cannot seriously regard the knowledge of such appearances as science, in the real sense of the term; for science must stand for the knowledge of objective truth or reality,—and such knowledge physical science fails to give us. But if physical science has led us out into the wilderness of agnosticism, and is inclined to keep us there, feeding on the husks of phenomena, we must at any rate give it credit for pointing beyond to the Promised Land of reality.
If science has done anything, it has more and more brought into view four great, inseparably related ideas, upon which it rests, and without which it can do nothing; and these ideas are unity, law, evolution, and mind. That is, nothing stands isolated by itself, for all things are so interrelated as to form one grand system or cosmic unity, so that the universe cannot be matter and mind; it must in the end be either matter or mind. In the second place, what constitutes this unity is that all things are related, not accidentally or haphazard, but according to great, permanent, rational laws, which we can more and more understand, and upon which we can depend, as if all rested upon an immutable moral integrity.
But, thirdly, in addition to this moral integrity of a static condition of law, there is revealed the moral purpose of a dynamic, progressive evolution, moving forward toward some great end. Finally, the only real nature which can be discovered in this one cosmic order is that of mind. All the doctrines of matter and motion in space and time, as revealing a material world, are but theories which mortal man has devised to explain certain forms of his experience. His analysis drives matter back to more refined and subtle forms, until it becomes a form of substantial thought; while, under the same analysis, motion refines into a form of causal will. So that, since all we know of the objective world reveals rational law and the unfolding of a rational purpose, the only conclusion possible is that the one substantial, causal reality is mind, while the world of nature is its conditioned manifestation in space and time. Therefore, the deepest revealing of science is that the transcendent "infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed" is the absolute Mind, immanent in the world, that one changeless power by which and in which we live and move and have our being. Thus it is that we have the strange spectacle of a science that practically imprisons us in a world of phenomena, but at the same time theoretically enforces the great idealistic doctrine of Mind.
The reader doubtless has already anticipated the meaning of all this. He sees that science, as a knowledge of mere phenomena, is really demanding a further expression of itself, as a knowledge of reality, and that it is pressing toward a fulfilment which, nevertheless, in itself it cannot attain. And he sees that what physical science cannot attain is at last brought to pass in Christian Science, which raises our knowledge from phenomena to reality, or from a supposed material world to the world of Spirit. Thus the entire meaning of modern science, viz., the knowledge of and mastery over the world for the benefit and use of man, which science itself cannot bring to full expression because it deals only with phenomena, is finally taken up by, and brought to ultimate fulfilment in, Christian Science, because it rests upon reality as Mind or Spirit, to which the entire order of phenomenal nature can at last, for the first time, be brought into a harmonious subordination. The world is in no sense destroyed, but reinterpreted and transformed in the light of spiritual reality; in other words, the kingdom of God is brought to fulfilment on earth, even as it is in heaven.
This is the tremendous significance of what Mrs. Eddy has done in bringing science to its full meaning; but in that very fact she has also brought religion to its full meaning, by raising doctrine from an object of theoretical belief to an object of clear practical understanding. So long as science dwells in the realm of phenomena, as material reality, men wander amid illusions, where they fall into all the sins of ill-will in the mad pursuit of phantom pleasures. Thinking false, they will wrong. So long as religion only believes in reality, it can never secure its chief concern in bringing to realization the kingdom of God on earth. Mere belief in reality has no dynamic power. We cannot, therefore, overestimate the priceless value of Mrs. Eddy's work, in gathering up all the past converging tendencies of both religion and science, into a rational doctrine that fully expresses both, by which religion becomes scientific and science becomes religious.
Just as the Christian consciousness fulfilled the Hebrew ethics and the Greek science by combining them into a new progressive order of historical development for mankind, so Christian Science fulfils Christianity by bringing into complete unity its Hebrew ethical and Greek scientific elements, in the dispensation of the divine Spirit, which constitutes a new and higher progressive order of historical development for mankind. As the ritualistic Church gave way, in the march of history, to the dogmatic Church, so the dogmatic Church has given way to the spiritual Church, and from now on mankind are prepared to combat intelligently the evils that beset them, because they not only understand the origin of these evils to be in error and sin, in mistakes in thought and perversities of will, but they know that freedom and self-realization alone lie in thinking God's thought and willing God's will, as the harmonious beauty of infinite Truth, manifesting eternal goodness. There is no other reality and Life; all else is illusion, sorrow, and death.
Thus Christian Science is not other than and beyond Christianity, it is Christianity. It is other than and beyond the past ritualistic and dogmatic aspects of Christianity, for it constitutes the spiritual Church, which not only belongs to the future, but which has been and is the dynamic progressive power of all time.
