Christian Science comes to no two of us in the same way and finds no two of us at the same starting point. We may have a sick body or a sick business and some longing for spiritual things, or perhaps some friend's experience has turned us to Christian Science for healing. We may always have longed for a clear and comprehensible religion in place of orthodoxy's corporeal sense of heaven and earth, and Christian Science seems likely to supply it; but whatever may be our particular need and in whatever way we may begin to try to apply Christian Science to its healing, it is just there that we start on that journey from the false sense of things to the truth. It does not make any difference whether one's start is whole-hearted or half-hearted, whether it is taken to please others or of fierce necessity; whether we realize it at the time or not we have set our feet on that road which in spite of all our wanderings and mistakes grows clearer and clearer to the sight and ends only in spiritual life understood and materiality overcome.
I well remember my own experience, as a case in point. Christian Science was brought to my notice for the first time by a member of my family who had heard of it from a friend. Being sick and despondent I eagerly jumped at it and the only fear was that it would prove too good to be true. Shortly afterwards "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy was borrowed and anxiously read, but the disappointment was keen because the book seemed to me to be incomprehensible and to deal with vague hypotheses altogether outside of human experience.
In spite of the disappointment, however, which resulted in the study being discontinued for a time, the desire to read the book again and to understand it never left me, and the next time the textbook became available sufficient of it was grasped and put into practice to remove any doubts that here was the pearl of great price that all the world needed and which many were actually looking for.
And so in an infinite variety of ways we start on the road that leads upward. Perhaps our first problem is quickly solved and we are healed. Sickness is replaced with abounding health, bankruptcy with affluence, the depressing sense of a distant and corporeal God with a glimpse of the one infinite and omnipresent Mind and His idea, man, and so there begins to dawn upon us the perception that an infinitely greater task than being willing or even anxious to be healed awaits us, and that is the task of learning the new truth for ourselves, of ordering a new life, and of taking up a daily cross.
Once again I can illustrate the point from my own experience and can vividly remember the shock of first hearing that Christian Science was a religion to be lived and a truth to be learned and practiced as well as a glorious method of healing. It was an early footstep and one of the few that did not have to be retaken. So we begin to see that there is daily work to be done, a ceaseless watch to be kept on thought, word, and deed, and a material sense of self to be denied. We accomplish it feebly at first, but ever more clearly by means of those infallible guides which Mrs. Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, has prepared for us. First and foremost we learn by means of our daily study of the Lesson-Sermons in the Bible and the Christian Science textbook. We learn it by means of our daily prayer given us by Mrs. Eddy in Article VIII, Section 4, of the Manual, where she says: "It shall be the duty of every member of this Church to pray each day: 'Thy kingdom come;' let the reign of divine Truth, Life, and Love be established in me, and rule out of me all sin; and may Thy Word enrich the affections of all mankind, and govern them!"
The Leader of the Christian Science movement, Mrs. Eddy, has provided for every emergency and left no gate unguarded. We have the Manual of The Mother Church with its clarion call to that obedience to Principle which is an impervious armor, and in the by-law entitled "Alertness to Duty" (Art. VIII, Sect. 6) she tells us: "It shall be the duty of every member of this Church to defend himself daily against aggressive mental suggestion, and not be made to forget nor to neglect his duty to God, to his Leader, and to mankind. By his works he shall be judged,—and justified or condemned."
Then we have the Christian Science Sunday services, shorn of all ritualism and mystery, where the pure milk of the word is read for our hearing and healing. We have the priceless Wednesday evening testimony meetings, where our increasing sense of gratitude for Christian Science help and healing finds expression with blessings to ourselves and others. The Christian Science periodicals come monthly, weekly, and daily, filled with the clear thought of the Christian Science field and the recital of health and harmony experienced, and in The Christian Science Monitor we have been given an educative and unifying force which Mrs. Eddy saw was absolutely necessary to heal the world's hatreds and misunderstandings and to bind its countries together by means of knowledge of each other's merits, aims, problems, and progress. Surely with such a marvelous foundation laid for us we have no excuse for not building our temple. And we are building it.
Some time or other, however, all of us come to places where opportunities outside all previous experience present themselves and a thousand nameless fears assail us and strive to prevent us from improving the opportunities. We are not sure where they may lead. We excuse ourselves by saying that we do not doubt God, we doubt our own understanding of Him, forgetting that to doubt the availability of God's idea is necessarily to doubt God, who is the infinite source of that idea. But God is never absent and is infinitely loving. As Mrs. Eddy writes on page 19 of "Christian Healing," "Tireless Being, patient of man's procrastination, affords him fresh opportunities every hour; but if Science makes a more spiritual demand, bidding men go up higher, he is impatient perhaps, or doubts the feasibility of the demand."
At a horse show, during a jumping competition, when the bars are getting higher, how often a horse which has certainly taken many such leaps many times before will seem to be overcome by fear and either refuse to face the trial altogether or will try to find an easier way and gallop past it on the flat. The rider brings him back again and again patiently and firmly, encouraging him, and the moment comes when he shakes off the fear as suddenly as he seemed to submit to it, and over he goes without touching a hoof. So it is with us. Divine Principle, infinitely patient, leads us again and again to the same opportunities. It may be that we do not recognize them for the same, it may be that we come to them by altogether different paths, but if we are faithful and sincere, we shall gain strength and confidence from our failures and we shall take the step at last into a greater freedom, and our means for doing good will be proportionately increased.
Thought is being spiritualized, the pleasures and pains of matter are becoming less important. We find we have little or no time for worrying about other people's affairs, and we gain a glimpse of the tremendous value of so ordering our thought that we can dismiss from it whatever is discordant as soon as we have uncovered and completely denied it, confident that the unerring action of Truth will obliterate and destroy it. We are gaining confidence. Temptations of course come, for error claims to be as universal and omnipotent as Truth, the All, the only presence, and the claims of error are as legion as the demoniac's devils; but the warfare with one's self is, in fact, the only warfare there is, and to conquer is to overcome the world, the flesh, and the devil.
We learn these lessons daily, in our church, in our home, and in our business. In place of belief in our own infallibility we learn tolerance and the rights of others, and we displace despotic opinion with an acknowledgment of individual liberty of conscience and the right to interpret infinite Truth rightly. In place of silence and perhaps silent resentment we learn to speak what we believe to be the truth and to leave its propagation in God's hands, knowing that the truth cannot be stifled and that error must inevitably fall to the ground and be buried. And we learn to have patience and to stand. When all we hold dear is flouted, frowned upon, and outlawed, we learn not to retaliate, but with all our halting might to cling to Jesus' words from his Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven." We do not have to wait for our rewards on our journey out of materiality.
There is no end to Christian Science. The greater progress gives the grander view, and the grander view contains the greater task. God is infinite good unfolding infinitely, and the practice of infinite good is infinite task and infinite accomplishment. So with our feet on the path and the goal in our hearts we hasten onward. We stumble and slip but we rise the stronger; we may get lost but we are not afraid. Christ Jesus the Way-shower opened the path and trod it to the perfect end of all belief in matter. Mrs. Eddy rediscovered the lost path, explored it, mapped it out, and protected it with impregnable defenses.
In one clear sentence familiar to every student of Christian Science she states the whole progress and process out of matter into Spirit when she says on page 323 of Science and Health, "Through the wholesome chastisements of Love, we are helped onward in the march towards righteousness, peace, and purity, which are the landmarks of Science. Beholding the infinite tasks of truth, we pause,—wait on God. Then we push onward, until boundless thought walks enraptured, and conception unconfined is winged to reach the divine glory."
