THERE are some five hundred and seventy-two direct references to Jesus of Nazareth in Mrs. Eddy's book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," alone, without counting those to the Christ. Among them are some eight in which he is described distinctively as the Saviour, without mentioning those in which this title is conveyed. Christ is not a synonym for Jesus by any means, but rather a title, being roughly the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Messiah or Anointed. The Greek term is, of course, Jesus the Christ, and it may be interesting to examine the exact relation of these words to one another.
The idea of the Messiah was not so exclusively a Hebraic one as is commonly supposed. During centuries of the Christian era the famous Fourth Eclogue was regarded with a veneration second only to the book of Isaiah. Human thought was permeated with the idea in its more material Judaic sense. The peasants of Wales, as they listened to the bards singing of "the passing of Arthur," saw in the Usk rolling down to Caerleon a new Jordan, and in the dragon of Pendragon the flaming crest of the man who was to drive the Saxons across the Severn sea, just as the plowman of Judea had waited for the Messiah who was to hurl the Romans into the mare Internum.
There are few more interesting studies than the Fourth Eclogue, and the whole phase of what might well be termed Messianic folk-lore, in their relation to the four great prophecies of Isaiah, known as "the servant of Jehovah." The writer of those prophecies saw, with unerring spiritual insight, the nature of "the servant," as set forth in Cheyne's Translation:
