Carlyle says somewhere that if we look deep enough we shall always find harmony. That is what Christian Science is doing: it is teaching us to look deep enough. It is in this direction also that Jesus' teaching is distinguished. It plunges far enough beneath the surface of all contradictions—of good and evil, Spirit and matter, Soul and sense, Principle and person—to reach the permanent foundation of absolute Truth as the basis of its system of ethics.
Christian Science, in its insistence on the all-sufficiency and all-inclusiveness of Spirit, on the oneness and indivisibility of divine Life,—Life in no way linked with or modified by any seeming modes of evil,—is slowly, but surely, revolutionizing all our thinking. After Jesus' time, confusion as to his teaching seemed to spring up; and it was not till Mrs. Eddy's pure spiritual vision was brought to bear on the Scriptures that the attempts of the so-called human mind at the fusion of materiality with spiritual truths was completely uncovered. She has shown in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" how Jesus' words and works point conclusively to the fact that Spirit and matter are opposites. She says, on page 279, that they "can neither coexist nor cooperate, and one can no more create the other than Truth can create error, or vice versa." She also gives this point very significant expression when she says (p. 113): "Life, God, omnipotent good, deny death, evil, sin, disease.— Disease, sin, evil, death, deny good, omnipotent God, Life."
As Christian Science teaches, there can be no possible compromise between these opposites. We see that the beliefs of matter and the truth about Spirit are mutually exclusive; that just to the extent we hold to the one, we drive the other out of consciousness. And we are following Jesus' example only as we keep them entirely separate, holding firmly to the truth of the reality of Spirit and seeing the unreality of matter. Sometimes this is no easy task, either. Time and again in our thought the line of distinction and differentiation becomes indistinct; and when, after repeated attempts to rid ourselves of some evil belief, the problem seems only to grow more burdensome it is well to call a halt to see if it is not some effort of mortal mind to mingle these opposites, which is causing the delay. The chances are that we have been working superficially, and have not struck deep enough. To fail to turn completely in the direction of Spirit is to cast our net on the wrong side, and like the disciples of old we shall then toil all night and catch nothing. Jesus' advice at that time, it will be remembered, was to ''launch out into the deep."
