THE study of Christian Science, coupled with earnest and sincere effort to conform to its teachings, results in a mighty mental revolution, an overturning of the established order of thinking and the acceptance of a new standard. At first the inquirer is buoyed up by the hope that God will heal him, whether his sickness be physical, mental, or moral, and this hope grows into faith as a faint glimpse of the truth taught in Christian Science is grasped. This faith may be, and frequently is, sufficient to result in a healing that is marvelous to human consciousness. Following this experience, the student begins, as did Mrs. Eddy, to see the necessity of learning how the healing was accomplished, and he enters upon the stage of spiritual understanding of the laws of God and their application to the human race.
At this point in the journey from sense to Soul he begins to realize the great difference between Christian Science and all other religions and philosophies. Every religion the world has known, every system of philosophy, and every phase of physical science, insists that God (to use the religious term), or the First Cause (to use the material scientist's term), is unknowable. Herbert Spencer in his great work "First Principles" devotes more than six hundred pages to an effort to reduce material science to a First Cause, and reaches the conclusion that while it must be admitted there is a First Cause, it is impossible to know it, to conceive of it; that the First Cause is unknowable, unthinkable. Religious systems have held to the same conclusion, though they have reached it by different methods of argument. "The ways of God are inscrutable," is a favorite religious declaration.
Christian Science, diametrically opposed to all these systems, insists that God is knowable. Further than that, Christian Science insists that God must be known by every one, a state of mental awareness foreshadowed in the prophecy which declared, "They shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest." Christian Science goes still farther, and accepts literally Jesus' saying, "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God." Even more than this, Christian Science maintains that all the life which man has consists in what he knows about God. From this it logically follows that ignorance of God is death, stagnation, inaction, non-thinking.
