CHRISTIAN SCIENCE is the attempt to make practical in the twentieth century the religion which Jesus of Nazareth preached and practised in the first century. This religion was something more than a mere transcendental altruism doomed to be relegated in practise, as the wise men according to the flesh have decreed of the Sermon on the Mount, to the realm of the unattainable. The Sermon on the Mount, despite acres of foolish exegesis, is really the zenith of what may be termed applied Christianity, and this claim has been made for it by Mrs. Eddy in her Message to The Mother Church, June, 1901. The world regards the Sermon on the Mount very much as the priest and the Levite, it is to be suspected, regarded the unfortunate man who fell among thieves. It resents, that is to say, its obtrusion upon the material senses, and leaves the solution of its riddles to the metaphysically minded Samaritan.
It has been said more than once, in deprecation of close metaphysical analysis, that the main thing in Christian Science is the spirit. No doubt the spirit is the main thing, but the spirit is absolutely inseparable from a metaphysical understanding. You might just as well say that the main thing in swimming is the movement of the arms and legs, and that it does not matter whether or not you have the use of your limbs, as to attempt to divorce metaphysics from practical Christianity. A knowledge of metaphysics is not attained, however, by a mere declaration that matter is unreal, any more than an understanding of astronomy is reached by simply asserting that the earth revolves round the sun. You could no more calculate an eclipse by a mere acceptance of the one than you could demonstrate the truth of being by a pious belief in the other. The eclipse may take place in any case or a patient may get well, but the first result would no more be a proof of the accuracy of mathematics than the second would be of Christian healing.
The fact is, that Christian Science is Science; not, certainly, the science of the schools, but the scientific idealism of the New Testament. The miracles were not the casual acts of a god come down to earth, for that would reduce them to the level of pagan mythology. They were, on the contrary, demonstrations of a knowledge of divine Science. Nobody imagines that it is possible to build a bridge and disregard the requirements of applied mechanics. We have seen at Quebec and on the Tay what happens when this is attempted. It is still less possible to demonstrate the truth of Christian Science without an adherence to the law of applied Christianity. Just as there is no such thing as being "near enough" in mechanics, so there is no such thing as being near enough in religion, though a good many people seem to think there is, and call it having the spirit. The Bible, in a phrase which has been quoted again and again in writing of Christian Science, talks repeatedly of the full, exact, or scientific knowledge of God. The student of mechanics can no more afford to be careless in calculating the strain upon a cantilever, than can the student of Christian Science in determining the exactness of a metaphysical axiom. "A single mistake in metaphysics, or in ethics," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 26 of Miscellaneous Writings, "is more fatal than a mistake in physics."
