IN her work, "The People's Idea of God," Mrs. Eddy says, "Periods and peoples are characterized by their highest or their lowest ideals, by their God and their devil." "Thus it is that our ideas of divinity form our models of humanity" (pp.6, 14). From this it is evident that we must read human history in terms of spiritual progress in order to understand its true significance; and this view is rapidly prevailing. Historians and economists, it is true, have interpreted history each according to his own particular outlook. Some regard it as a political evolution; others define it as a series of moral or economic changes; while the churchman is very apt to consider religion as the controlling note in its records. According to Christian Science, the dominant and impelling factor in the evolution of the race is God! The essence of history is the true idea of God, always expressing itself in clearer and more definite terms, as the darkness of materialism and superstition yield to an increasing spirituality.
The progress of mortal man from the time when he emerges from the gloom of primeval obscurity and makes his first appearance on "the threshold of the historic day," up to the present, has been distinctly a moral evolution. Each succeeding stage of growth has shown old standards outgrown and abandoned, new ideals adopted, a steady upward climb, human thought gradually becoming moralized and spiritualized, until today we have arrived at the point of development where we possess the fullest and most complete interpretation of Life as God that has ever dawned upon human consciousness. This interpretation, or point of development, is called Christian Science, and it is just what Mrs. Eddy declared it to be, both a discovery and a revelation. It is not a mere dogmatic declaration; it is a discovery of fundamental, spiritual truth; in other words, a revelation of God to man.
Christian Science is the fulfilment of prophecy. Its coming into the world just when it did and how it did, was as inevitable as the journeys of the planets around the sun. The discovery of Christian Science was not casually accomplished, any more than it was an accident. Its appearing was not untimely, because it had been heralded for centuries. It is, in reality, the culmination of racial unfoldment, so to speak. It is the result of centuries of growth and improvement. It was impossible that the new ideals embodied in the teaching of Christian Science should have been delayed in their revelation to mankind, and it is equally impossible that this revelation should have come prematurely. Christian Science is a phase of world development out of primitive ignorance into spiritual understanding.
