EDUCATED bias constitutes a serious disability to the understanding of Christian Science, and it has been peculiarly manifest in Christian believers, especially theologians. A great and eventful change is, however, taking place. "The truth will out," and many ministers are discovering that Christian Science is worth while, and they are growing more willing to be instructed respecting it. Said a clergyman, recently, one who was so free and fair-minded as to have invited a Christian Scientist to address his congregation upon the subject, "I believe there is a great truth in your teaching, but I cannot explain Mrs. Eddy's unique and unwarranted use of Scriptural terms; for instance, she gives the word faith a meaning that is quite at variance with Christian thought generally and with the Master's use of the term."
For Christian Scientists to meet with those who are thus kindly though critical, presents an opportunity which they may well prize and which they should wisely utilize. Every intelligent Scientist not only has a satisfying raison d'être to offer in answer to criticism, but to right a wrong here is to launch a corrective influence under circumstances which give it the largest range of usefulness. Mrs. Eddy recognized the hazard to which this minister referred. She knew that misapprehension and misjudgment were likely to attend her use of terms, and she was most careful so to define their meaning in her use as to make it impossible for those who remember the definite content thus assigned them to misunderstand her.
It is apparent that all spiritual advance registers and involves the disclosure of the richer, truer significance of terms. The fact of varying degrees of intelligence and receptivity has in one sense forced upon all religions, including the Hebrew, an esoteric and an exoteric teaching. To the cultivated Egyptians and Greeks their religious terms, symbols, and rituals conveyed an altogether different meaning from that gained by the commoner. In a sense this was also true of the Hebrews. The prophets were ever trying to free the people from their enslavement to a false sense of God and of His requirements, and this often made their utterances an offense to pharisaic ritualists. So, too, in revealing the spiritual content of their Scriptures Christ Jesus was pronounced a teacher of strange doctrines by the churchmen of his day. To illustrate: The word sacrifice had come to mean to the Jews the giving up of something of value in order to atone for sin. Jesus taught that sacrifice means separation from falsity; that God does not demand the giving up of good in sacrifice, but rather the acceptance of good, the giving up of evil. He quite reversed their thought, and yet in this he but followed the great prophets before him who were ever rebuking superficiality and emphasizing vital truths.
