TO every mortal burdened with cares or surfeited with elusive pleasures, Christian Science offers escape from the old bondage through "newness of life" and efficacious service to mankind in "newness of spirit." For binding conservatism and deferred hope it offers the present fruits of spiritual understanding. "Newness of life" is won through the understanding of Life as Spirit, God, as substantial, and not evanescent either in cause or effect. With tender care God, everlasting Life and Love, holds in changeless harmony all His creation. Even dimly realized, this fact of God's omnipotent care for all His own lifts from the human heart its anxious concern regarding life and livelihood. For the old sense of being uncared for, unprovided for, Christian Science substitutes the grateful recognition of the motherhood and fatherhood of divine Love. With this "newness of life" comes a new outlook, a new sense of stability, capacity, and opportunity.
Christian Science brings to humanity the scientific understanding of God and of the beneficent laws governing His creation. It also calls for obedience to these laws. Spiritual understanding and its faithful application frees human thought of sin and fear, and thus destroys their phenomena, sickness, want, and woe. In other words, "newness of life" indicates a mental renewal wrought through infinite Mind. Humanity's greatest need is to understand and to depend upon the fundamental spiritual facts of being. Christian Science meets this need through revealing Spirit as the sole origin of all real being, and spiritual life, spiritual qualities, substance, and vision, as the heritage of man. All that Mind imparts to man is forever available and immune from loss or fluctuation. Humanity finds itself deprived of health, happiness, and human necessities through its consent to depend upon that which is undependable, namely, materiality. Man in God's likeness consciously depends upon God for his existence and his happiness. Knowing himself as the expression of God, the one immutable cause, he abides consciously in Godlikeness and security.
Christian Science teaches both the necessity for putting off materiality and the way to accomplish it. What does it demand in exchange for "newness of life"? This Science demands the unreserved surrender of pessimistic views, resentment, envy, ingratitude, and fear, whose shadows darken human consciousness. These ghosts of material sense, these phantoms of ignorance and superstition, disappear with the coming of spiritual understanding, and they can disappear in no other way. Whoever shapes his views according to the spiritual revelation of Christian Science finds a new and basic truthfulness permeating his thoughts, cleansing and beautifying his character, and thereby improving the conditions of his daily living. A new and heavenly light is shed upon the pathway of one who is learning to bring his every thought under the government of God, divine Principle. This government brings a wealth of spiritual vision, and so destroys the mental penury hitherto objectified in poor health, lack, sin, joylessness. In place of man-made dogmas and traditions which starve humanity, Christian Science presents the truth of spiritual being, the bread of life, which mostly remains unsought until the need for it is discovered to be urgent. The truth about God and man inclines human thought away from mistaken precedents and pessimistic thinking into the domain of Truth and its freedom.
