No teaching of Christian Science is more distinctive or more significant in its effects than that found in the emphasis which it lays upon demonstrable truth-knowing as the essential factor of Christian faith. In this it presents a great contrast to that very general religious teaching which gives prominence to unquestioning belief as the ground of our salvation, and to an ecstatic state of emotion as the evidence that one is saved or forgiven. That the Master was moved by all true and brotherly feelings, none would question. His human nature did not lack either sympathy or sentiment. Full well he knew the way to the hearts of the simple-minded peoples about him, and he won them as easily and certainly as he confounded the erudite and rebuked the conventionally self-satisfied and exclusive. Nevertheless, he purposefully presented the distinctive feature of his gospel when he said to the woman at the well, "We know what we worship." Further, when he came to instruct his disciples as to the way of escape from the bondage of sin, he made it a matter not of feeling or emotion but of spiritual intelligence or perception, and uttered those remarkable words, "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," thus recognizing the high privilege which pertains to aspiring human consciousness, and paying his followers the greatest possible compliment by defining their spiritual capacity and prerogative.
How full of meaning is this his one prescription for humanity's cure! How unequivocally it speaks for the fact that the divine law and order, in conformity with which he did his mighty works, is knowable to all who earnestly desire and faithfully seek illumination; that "the deep things of God" named by Paul mysteries—which surely are such to the materialistic and the worldly, which the great apostle, however, constantly declared were savingly intelligible—may be understood by sincere truth-seekers in every age. This proposition is no less logical than inspiring. If man is made in the likeness of God, and if it is possible for him to commune with his Father, then the word of God must be apprehensible to all, in so far as they truly hunger and thirst after righteousness. And yet this thought has never been accepted by that great body of Christian believers who undertake to explain their confessed inability to repeat the Master's works by averring that they do not and cannot know the things of God as did he and his immediate disciples.
Further, this teaching of our Lord, and of Christian Science, speaks for the fact that mankind's one all-enslaving enemy is error, the universal subjection to a false sense, from which in the very nature of things it is the province of the truth, and truth alone, to set men free; and it thus reveals the philosophy of salvation, the educational nature of the process of human redemption: that we are to be instructed out of the ignorance of inherited materiality, and that our advance will therefore be determined by our responsiveness to spiritual truth, our willingness to receive the light and to use what we have already gained, that we may thereby enlarge our vision.
