IT is sometimes said, even by those who have made progress in the study of Christian Science, that this Science requires its students to separate themselves from their fellows and to work out their own salvation in a kind of mental aloofness and isolation; in other words, that the student must surrender all intimate associations and stand utterly alone. It would perhaps be difficult to find a more misleading and forbidding misconception of the real teachings of Christian Science and of the Bible,—forbidding as much to spiritual love and compassion as to the instincts of friendliness and good-fellowship so deeply embedded in the better human consciousness.
Nowhere in the Bible or in our Leader's writings is there any authority for such a supposition. While we are constantly urged in the Scriptures to individual effort, and taught that "every man shall bear his own burden," yet before this comes the imperative command, "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ." Throughout the Bible there is a constant call to unity among the people of God, a divine demand which reaches its rounded fulness of expression in our Master's prayer, "That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us."
In the fourth chapter of Ephesians, in which the oneness of God's idea is so clearly set forth, Paul speaks of the time when we shall "all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." In the marginal note the word "in" is translated "into," making the passage read, "Till we all come into the unity of the faith,"— a rendering which more clearly indicates that unity is an essential condition of perfection, and therefore an indispensable part of the Christian Scientist's demonstration.
