In the New Testament the word translated assembly is the same as that translated church, namely, èκκλŋσía. This is surely no mere chance; on the contrary, the writers of the books in which the word occurs must have had a clear perception of the fact that the assembly, like the church, was not a mere gathering together of so many persons, but was, as Mrs. Eddy explains, on page 583 of Science and Health, a mental concept, "The structure of Truth and Love; whatever rests upon and proceeds from divine Principle." That, of course, is the spiritual idea of Church, but the spiritual idea has its material counterfeit in the assemblies of human beings, which, rather than the spiritual idea itself, the world came to regard as church, even before it went a step further and bestowed the name of church on the edifice in which the church gathered.
Unfortunately the material mind necessarily forms material images, and the manifestation of Truth is no more apparent to its materiality than the person of the risen Savior was manifest to the Roman sentinels in Gethsemane, to the Jews pursuing their business in the streets of Jerusalem or treading the road to Emmaus, In the first century of the Christian era nobody, of course, had come to regard the place of meeting as the church. Even centuries later when the Christians of Europe employed the symbol of the ship to typify the church, and carved its stern-sheets in the marble of the cathedral at Torcello, they never imagined that it was the cathedral that was the church, but the worshipers who gathered within it. Thus in the use of the word church, as in the case of all material language, it is necessary to rely upon a metaphysical understanding in order to grasp the fact; since, as Mrs. Eddy writes on page 269 of Science and Health, "Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul."
When these objects of sense are exchanged for the ideas of Soul, it is because the human mind has been destroyed by the Mind of Christ, and it is only in proportion as this is accomplished that the true idea of church begins to dawn on a man's consciousness. It is perfectly easy to read Mrs. Eddy's simple words, that the Church is "the structure of Truth and Love," without the slightest real understanding of what that means. Immediately above them on the same page of the Glossary occurs the definition of Christ as, "The divine manifestation of God, which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error." Yet, to the man in the street, accustomed to think in terms of orthodox theology or in terms of matter, what does such a definition of the Christ really amount to? Only as the human being has seen sin, disease, and death destroyed through a realization of the nothingness of matter and the infinite omnipotence of the Christ, Truth, is it possible for Mrs. Eddy's definition of the Christ to resolve things into thoughts and so to exchange an understanding of Jesus of Nazareth for a knowledge of the Son of God, the Christ-idea "which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error."
