THE writer still remembers the eager expectancy with which he began to read "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," for the first time. During many years I had been puzzled by the conflict which appeared to exist between certain generally accepted religious doctrines and what seemed to be a more rational interpretation of being, and when I learned that there was a "Key to the Scriptures" to be had. I could scarcely wait to get' it. I at once began to congratulate myself that I was at last to have a correct explanation of the Bible passages which were taken by most Christian people in the past and by many of the present time, as the authority for the doctrines which I found myself unable to accept and which I could not bring myself to believe conveyed the real import of the word of God.
It was with eagerness, therefore, that I looked forward to the reading of the book of which I had heard, and I was anticipating a "feast of fat things" in the way of Biblical interpretation—but I was doomed to a very great disappointment, as it then seemed. The book was not at all what I thought it would be, my expectation having been that I would find in it an interpretation of each and all of those particular passages in the Bible which I had heard quoted in support of the doctrines of the many varying schools of religious thought. Still something held me to the textbook and I continued its study, to awaken, later on, to a realization of the fact that it was, after all, just what I wanted, and that it was, in deed and m truth, a Key to the Scriptures." The difference between what I had at first expected, and what I later realized with regard to the book, was that it did not undertake to go through the whole Bible and give an interpretation of each separate passage, but that after one came to see things from Mrs. Eddy 's view-point, the inner—the true—meaning of the Scriptures became readily discernible,—it could be seen for ones self; and since I have adopted her view-point as my own, it has been just the "feast" I was anticipating.
No passage in the Bible, perhaps, more clearly illustrates the fact that the Christian Science text-book is a "key" to God's Word than this one from St. John: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." How many thousands, like myself, have been unable to understand how justice could be "vindicated or moral integrity promoted by the escape of the guilty through the substitutional sacrifice of an innocent being, and how grateful we should be to Mrs. Eddy for having made it clear that the foregoing passage of Scripture is altogether true, but that its real meaning, and its only meaning, contains no suggestion of a substitutional atonement, but discovers to us the glorious possibility of a complete at-one-ment with God through the saving process which it points out.
