History records that during the reign of Emperor Constantine, over three hundred years after the birth of Christ Jesus, the primitive Christian religion became very popular; so popular, in fact, that the emperor himself felt impelled for political reasons to forsake his chosen faith and become "a Christian." Up to this time, so history records, the followers of Jesus, or the early Christians, had fulfilled the Master's prophetic words in John, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father." Those pioneers, struggling to maintain their hold on the Master's teaching, found few ready to forsake the ways of the world and embrace the Christ, Truth. Nevertheless, they performed many so-called miracles, healing the sick and the sinning and raising the dead.
The word "popular," above employed, in this connection signifies the tendency of mortal mind to mortalize all that it embraces. Needless to say, when the head of the Roman empire embraced the Christian religion, the news spread like wildfire; it became the fashion for the emperor's followers to embrace it likewise, and they cast off their old religion even as an out of date shoe. Now the propensity of mortal man to imitate his neighbor in order to gain or retain his favor, is not characteristic of one who is doing his own thinking, or thinking according to the dictates of the Lord. From this time on, the efforts of the remaining primitive Christians were perverted into endeavoring to keep in the good graces of the ruling monarch. They thus hardened their hearts, became blinded to the things of the Spirit, and fell into the old habit of believing that justification in the sight of men is requisite to self-respect. The scientific fact that man does not live to be known of men, but to express God, Spirit, was lost sight of, and the healing element in Christianity, the spirit, fell into temporary oblivion.
In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," our revered Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, has given us the "key" which reveals the primal reason why the healing element was lost sight of by those earlier disciples of Jesus. On page 189 she says, "The human mortal mind, by an inevitable perversion, makes all things start from the lowest instead of from the highest mortal thought." King David, when enumerating the sins of those children of Israel who had fallen away to follow after "other gods," had some understanding of this, for he says in one of his remarkable poems, "The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts."
