WHEN Mrs. Eddy wrote, in her Preface to Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. vii), "The time for thinkers has come," she did not imply that no one had been thinking up to that time. Creation, as is now coming to be recognized, is wholly a world of thought, since it plainly could not have come into existence except through Mind, and its inhabitants necessarily express mental activity; but the thinking which Mrs. Eddy here referred to was evidently of a much higher order than is usually indicated by the use of that word.
It was no material act or process, but something which was active in the mental life of Christ Jesus, something immeasurably greater than had been thought or understood by those about him, which healed the sick, increased the supply of food for the multitude, brought Lazarus alive from his tomb, and stilled the storm which terrified his disciples. Yet he taught that these things were not beyond the accomplishment of those who witnessed them.
The thoughts of Jesus were not the stereotyped product of the prevailing beliefs of his time. They were not cast in the mold of scholastic teaching, nor were they mere colorless repetitions of what had been voiced before him. He was a thinker beyond all who preceded him, because he consciously reflected the Mind which creates and governs the universe, and from which alone true thoughts can come. He was in all respects an original thinker, for no one on earth taught him what he knew of spiritual reality.
