IN an allegory in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mrs. Eddy refers (p. 438) to some well-known and oft-quoted Scriptural passages as bearing upon the rights of man, and remarks concerning them that the Bible is better authority on this subject than Blackstone. Her quotations in this connection, to wit, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion;" "Behold, I give unto you power... over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you;" and "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death," recognize man's sonship in God and reveal the source of all his rights. The magnitude of the promises gives rise, naturally, to honest questioning; for human experience, aside from the lives of the master Christian and his disciples, has not witnessed their fulfilment. Either God's promises fail, or mortals have not understood them. The first is unthinkable; the second entirely possible. Then, if the sorry plight of mankind is due to its own blindness, instruction concerning things spiritual is the great need; and the coming of such instruction should, logically, make clear and enforce through God's promises all the rights of man and of manhood.
The Christian Scientist is convinced that Mrs. Eddy's work, supplementing the teaching and healing of the early disciples, sets forth the spiritual instruction necessary to higher discovery of the rights of man. He holds this conviction because he is able to enjoy through her teaching more of his rights; and he comes to them, because in the study of Christian Science thought clears concerning that which constitutes his rights. First of all, the student of Christian Science learns to distinguish between spiritual man, made in God's likeness, and the mortal sense of manhood that sins, suffers, and dies. He finds that as God's reflection he has the right to, and has Christlikeness: that as the offspring of God, as a spiritual idea, dwelling forever in the infinite divine Mind which is God, he is entitled to "power over all the power of the enemy," to the exercise of dominion, to the privilege of never seeing death, as opposed to that mortal belief of inheritance which is only a procession of fleeting pleasures, sin, sickness, and death.
Religious teaching generally, outside of Christian Science, has confused this sinning and stricken mortal with God's creation; has supposed God to be the Father of an imperfect creature; has believed that unless this mortal can have the dominion and the power, the promise is void. Christian Science lifts thought to see that the promises were not made to mortality, but to spiritual manhood; that only as thought is spiritualized is their meaning discerned, only as spiritual law is really obeyed, and the manhood of God's making shines in daily experience, are the promises fulfilled.
