IN the Preface to the Christian Science text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mrs. Eddy explains briefly but forcefully her specific relation to the establishment of the Christian Science movement. Thus she says (p. xi), "When God called the author to proclaim His Gospel to this age, there came also the charge to plant and water His vineyard." In other words, she states that her responsibility by no means ceased when she had rediscovered the Science of Christianity. The fulfilment of her mission included the founding of an organization that should become the vehicle by which the saving power of Christ's Christianity could again be brought to suffering humanity.
It was Mrs. Eddy's "hunger and thirst after divine things" (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 31), her ceaseless prayer that she might know God, which made her the herald to this age of the Christ Science. Her continued prayer for divine guidance in founding and directing a church which should "commemorate the word and works of our Master," and "reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing" (Church Manual, p. 17), was answered as step after step was taken; and the record of these answers is preserved and made permanently available in the rules and by-laws of the Manual of The Mother Church. As their concept of Christian Science becomes enlarged and its mission of universal evangelization is more clearly discerned, Christian Scientists begin to see that it is their inescapable individual responsibility to understand and obey the laws and ordinances which are to guard and protect this great movement until Israel shall be fully restored.
In many respects the Manual bears the same relation to the Christian Science movement which the book of Deuteronomy bore to the Hebrew economy. Indeed, some leading Bible commentators describe Deuteronomy as "a layman's manual," in contradistinction to Leviticus, which was considered more of a handbook for the priesthood. Deuteronomy bore witness to the saving relation of Israel to the other nations of the world in somewhat the same way that Mrs. Eddy has presented through the Manual a general plan for the extension of Christian Science.
