To-day as never before humanity is struggling to redeem itself from various forms of bondage and oppression, while from all sides come ceaseless reports of the plans of autocracy, greed, militarism, ignorance, and racial prejudice to thwart mankind's desire for peace. Little by little it is becoming clear that the unity and freedom of mankind have not begun to be achieved except where the masses of individual men and women have awakened to higher and holier ideals of life. Christian Science shows how this awakening can be brought about, and has hastened it by giving to unnumbered thousands not only health and the desire to use their lives more unselfishly, but also the knowledge of how to gain the ideals for which men are striving but which as yet have been but dimly glimpsed. Christian Science confers an understanding of the reality and power of the ideal; it accepts as true ideals only those ideas which emanate from the Mind "which was also in Christ Jesus," and, in accepting them as the basis of reason and action, there is brought about the achievement of true idealism in individual human experience. On page 100 of "Miscellaneous Writings," Mrs. Eddy says: "Science speaks when the senses are silent, and then the evermore of Truth is triumphant. The spiritual monitor understood is coincidence of the divine with the human, the acme of Christian Science."
Although Christ Jesus revealed the ideal man, mankind believed for the most part, until Mrs. Eddy gave to the world her great discovery, that Jesus' command to his followers to be perfect, as the Father in heaven is perfect, was impracticable. Men had been content to cling to lesser so-called ideals, which, not emanating from the divine Mind, were undemonstrable because not truly ideal at all. Jesus proved that the real man is perfect, and that nothing imperfect is man. Christian Science, following closely the words and example of Jesus, explains clearly why man is and always has been the perfect idea, or son, of the perfect Principle, or Father. To human sense, trammeled as it is by the false belief that matter, the nonintelligent, is a creator, and that man is a finite mortal, the fact so tenderly stated in the first epistle of John, that ''now are we the sons of God," is not apparent, until, wearied with the fruits of the belief in a material creation—sin, sickness, and death—the human mind turns for relief to the contemplation of spiritual causation. Then it is that the words of John become true in individual experience, "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God," —that is, to manifest their sonship with God,—"even to them that believe on his name."
Now the Hebrews and early Christians did not use a name simply to point out an object of thought, but rather to designate the qualities and power of whatever was named; so that to "believe on his name," is to believe in the power of the qualities which Christ Jesus manifested. Bearing this in mind, the significance for us of this verse becomes clear; for are not they who believe on his name and who receive him the ones who accept as power the qualities which he manifested,—the qualities of love, meekness, and unwavering trust in Spirit? They indeed lose not a moment in beginning to lay aside the belief that there is any power in hate, matter, mysticism, or in anything else that our Master did not manifest or teach his followers to believe in. Thus they begin to put on the Mind of Christ and to prove that man is unified in the glory—or reflection— of God.
