There was a time when what we have termed miracles were common on earth. In the Bible we read that prophets and seers who thought in terms of Spirit instead of matter, healed the sick, fed the hungry, raised the dead. Then came Jesus, who, as Mrs. Eddy says on page 313 of Science and Health, "was the most scientific man that ever trod the globe. He plunged beneath the material surface of things, and found the spiritual cause." Jesus' healing work was done through his consciousness of Spirit; he never recognized matter as a life-giving power in word or in act or in the teaching he has left to us. After his ascension, his followers for many years worked in the same way that he did. Then gradually the church came to translate thought back from spiritual to material terms, and now men have for centuries believed matter to be a great reality. In the endeavor to help a miserable world, mortal man has bent his back and stretched his muscle and worn out his heart in a strenuous effort to improve conditions by material means. But is the world at bottom today really any less clamorous or selfish or poor or sick or degraded, for all the years that men have worked materially to improve it?
Christian Science comes with an imperative volte face. Its order is that men shall again possess the Mind that was in Christ Jesus, that they shall once more translate all thought from material to spiritual terms before they begin to work for the world's good. We cannot do the works of Jesus without his spirit. What was this spirit? On page 30 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy tells us again of Jesus: "In meekness and might, he was found preaching the gospel to the poor." Meekness and might is not a combination the material world has made. The material world has always very lightly esteemed meekness.
In the early ages, when Christianity fastened itself upon the heathen religions, it preached meekness and humility to men in whose carnal eyes such traits were contemptible. To them might was right; they lived by force, ready to seize what they wanted and to avenge every injury. What place had meekness in their theology? It took many years of teaching by the priests before humility was engrafted as a virtue on their disciples' thoughts, and even then it was only a passive virtue to which men must submit contrary to nature and inclination, because it was a doctrine of the church. To be humble by nature was to be weak.
