Christianly scientific thinking today imparts, silently and compellingly, the perennial assurance of Christly compassion. With particularly gentle persuasiveness it comes to heal the one tormented by the physical and moral accusations of personal sense. And current experience finds precedent in the Scriptural record of instances wherein the power of the Christ overruled the claim of materiality, and individuals were irresistibly drawn into a higher and nobler activity and freedom.
Luke tells of a feast which Simon the Pharisee had prepared to honor Jesus. "A woman in the city" entered the room where the feast was in progress. She was known to the Pharisee as "a sinner," and the account indicates that Simon was puzzled because Jesus, although recognized as a prophet, gave no evidence of so regarding her.
Graphically intimating the penetrating power of Christly compassion, which exposes the masquerade of personal sense, Mary Baker Eddy writes of this event (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 362): "Heedless of the fact that she was debarred from such a place and such society, especially under the stern rules of rabbinical law, as positively as if she were a Hindu pariah intruding upon the household of a high-caste Brahman, this woman (Mary Magdalene, as she has since been called) approached Jesus." Indeed, so tremendous was the entire lesson of this occasion that Mrs. Eddy has given in the opening pages of the chapter "Christian Science Practice" in the textbook a scientific interpretation of the event.
