When Mrs. Eddy wrote, on page 480 of Science and Health, "When the substance of Spirit appears in Christian Science, the nothingness of matter is recognized," when she embodied a somewhat similar statement in the fifth tenet, on page 497 of the same book, when, on pages 9 and 10 of "Unity of Good," she demanded, "What is the cardinal point of the difference in my metaphysical system?" and immediately answered her own question as follows, "This: that by knowing the unreality of disease, sin, and death, you demonstrate the allness of God. This difference wholly separates my system from all others," she offered a scientific challenge to the sects and to the schools, and one which Christian Scientists must be prepared to defend logically and to demonstrate practically, unless Christian Science is once more to be lost to the wayfaring man, in his struggle to understand God, Principle.
To say that matter is unreal because Spirit is infinite is merely to beg the question, enter the field of dogmatic assertion with the exponents of a material heaven and a material hell, and to shift the argument from one point to another, from the question of the unreality of matter to that of the infinity of Spirit. Obviously nothing can result from such tactics except a weakening of conviction, for, as Peter so truly told the scattered Christians in Asia, a man must have a reason for the hope that is in him. Peter, indeed, went further than this. He wrote of a scientific knowledge of God, Principle, and by so doing demanded from his readers a scientific reason for the hope that was in them. Such a reason is demanded all the more strongly from Christian Scientists. Eighteen centuries of Christian endeavor have given the opportunity for testing the truth of the gospel, and accumulating evidence of the demonstration of that truth, so that if ever the Christian is to be able to set forth his hope upon a scientific and demonstrable basis it should be now. That, surely, is why Mrs. Eddy has said, upon page 461 of Science and Health, "Christian Science must be accepted at this period by induction."
That statement makes it perfectly clear that Mrs. Eddy knew that the world was not ready to accept Christian Science by deduction, no matter how accurate the deduction might be. Therefore, she herself drew attention to the inadequacy to-day of the deduction that because Spirit is infinite, there is no matter, and so threw Christian Scientists back upon the necessity for accepting that fundamental statement of James, "Faith without works is dead.' Now induction is the accumulation of a large number of results, all of which can be traced and attributed to a common cause. If, then, the healing effected in Christian Science can be traced and attributed to the postulate of the unreality of matter, the soundest possible evidence of the truth of that postulate will have been supplied, and the necessity for grasping the meaning of the postulate, in its full scientific significance, redoubled. What, then, is meant exactly in Christian Science by the unreality of matter? For it is obvious that it is not just what Plato intended, what Abelard taught, what Berkeley contended for, or what the idealistic philosophers of to-day are insisting upon. It is the philosophy of the New Testament, the gospel of Jesus the Christ.
