ST. PAUL said, "For me to live is Christ," and in this short sentence he reveals the heart of Christian Science. Christ, Truth, is the motive, activity, and evidence of all true being. Through Isaiah, God declared, "Ye are even my witnesses;" hence man is the living proof of God, good. As men come to behold their real nature and relationship to God, they will apprehend that they are of those who know the truth, that they are in fact Christian Scientists. To be Christian Scientists indeed, we must render strict obedience to the injunction of the Master to forsake all else for him; or, as Mrs. Eddy has expressed it, "We are not Christian Scientists until we leave all for Christ" (Science and Health, p. 192).
A witness is defined as "one who yields or furnishes proof." So applying it, a luminous concept of the unity or at-one-ment of man with God is born. "Ye are the light of the world," saith the Christ; and it is in his light, by his light, and through his light, illuminating and purifying human thought, that we are enabled to understand God and so fulfil our true being. It is in and by this light that faith cometh, the faith by which the omnipotence of God, good, is made manifest through man, the ever-increasing capacity to do good.
All who have named the name of Christ have more or less honestly endeavored to gain an understanding of the sublimity of St. Paul's definition of faith as given in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews. Libraries have been written on the subject, yet the apprehension of the practical, continuous usableness of the substance of the word has not been brought out. Faith is the conscious, questionless, practised understanding of God, infinite Mind. It cometh not by strivings, but is capable of increasing infinitely, and does so increase in proportion to its single, unurged, and invariable use as incident to each unfoldment of truth in consciousness. Faith is the modus of the divine activity as outwardly expressed through man. It is by faith that men become patently fruitful, yielding or bearing sure evidence or proof of God, Life. The compassionate rebuke, "O ye of little faith," uttered by the Master, is applicable today, and is a vivid summons to a life, an activity, that cannot be withstood. How many of us who profess to be Christian Scientists, who declare that in God alone is our being, are like certain of the Ephesians of old, who walked in lazy blindness of belief and deadness of faith? It is impossible to behold in the Christ the glory of God, to feel the present all-sufficiency of "Immanuel," unless we are delivered "from the body of this death."
