IN her Message to The Mother Church for 1900 (p. 9) Mary Baker Eddy said, "The twentieth century in the ebb and flow of thought will challenge the thinkers, speakers, and workers to do their best."
Progress is a perpetual challenge to anything that would impede its continuance. It is unlimited, having no specific termination. Christian Science presents progress from the standpoint of spiritual causation, for, as Mrs. Eddy says in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 170), "Spiritual causation is the one question to be considered, for more than all others spiritual causation relates to human progress." Christian Scientists, then, do not challenge error as if it were personal or national, but rather do they challenge evil in the light, of spiritual causation, and find it powerless. In this way they face the seeming foe without hatred, criticism, or fear, and always with healing love and understanding.
Progress is motion in its true sense; and under examination it always shows an advance. As in metallurgy the minute particles of gold, through the process of amalgamation, are finally made into a unified whole, so the gold of human character, manifested throughout human history and separated from the general mass of events in which it appears, is unified into human progress. The progress of humanity thus results from a steady, irresistible impulse. It cannot be otherwise. Therefore, if at any time it should seem to be not so, this is because, to speak in mining parlance, in the mental assaying of events we fail to apply the proper test and so seem to receive a blank, that is, fail to recover the gold. This, then, is the challenge that thinkers and workers must answer in this twentieth century, that in the activity of thought the gold of the truth about God and man shall be retained.
