Christian Science is appealing more and more irresistibly to reasoning men and women all over the world. "The time for thinkers has come," as Mrs. Eddy so profoundly says on page vii of the Preface to "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." Humanity suffers and is tortured by doubt as to the existence of the spiritual verities of which the material senses bear no testimony, but nevertheless is willing and pathetically eager to know the truth that makes men free, when that truth has been rationally demonstrated. Those who seek to do Life's work aright will no longer be content to accept their religious beliefs from the dead hand of the past in the form of creeds and articles of faith; they will rather insist upon doing their own thinking and understanding God instead of merely acknowledging Him as an object of blind belief.
A conception which has done much to startle the world from a smug contentment with the past and a belief in a personal God—a great Man in the skies—has been Darwin's theory of evolution. In this theory is embodied materialism in its grossest form: man is but the offspring of the brutes, self-generated, self-existent, and self-perpetuating; not in God but in a material protoplasm has he his origin; and not God's will, but his own, in fierce competition and strife with others of his species, directs his progress and growth. This is the significance of the theory which to-day is universally accepted by biologists,—nay, acclaimed by them as the fundamental law of the organic world just as is the law of gravitation in the physical. Yet, surely, nothing can be more wholly material. God is left out of His own universe; matter becomes the only reality of which we can have knowledge. In this theory of evolution immortality, freedom, and God are mere postulates which it is impossible for the understanding to prove or to disprove, though they may be believed in as an act of blind faith. From here it is easy to pass to the belief that matter is not only the real but the only real; God, immortality, and a spiritual world of holiness and perfection are held to be mere chimeras of the imagination, which it is the part of the educated person to brush away. The thinker of to-day cannot believe in a moral, intellectual, or religious basis, which is not capable of demonstration to his reason and in his experience. This is the breaking down of the old which has given the "everlasting No" to ancient doctrines and dogmas, but has frequently brought in its train atheism, infidelity, and all of a host of diseases of religious thought.
But such atheists may be healed of their perversion by Christian Science; in fact, they are in too many cases more teachable than the average orthodox churchgoer. They at least have cast away the mental rubbish of prejudice and dogma, and but await the knowledge of a religion which shall satisfy their reason as well as quench their emotional thirst for divine draughts of Truth. They have taken the first step in scientific development, that of tearing down the old and false; it is so much the easier for them to take the second, that of building up with the good and the true.
