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THE SIMPLICITY OF THE CHRIST

From the May 1944 issue of The Christian Science Journal


The human mind loves mystery and miracle. It likes to believe that there is resident within itself an occult power that the initiated can use to produce effects that the uninitiated know not how to combat, and so must become its victims. The effect of mystery is usually to provoke fear. One fears the unknown, because he knows not what he has to meet or how to meet it. It is interesting to note that in the book of Revelation "mystery" is the name written on the forehead of the Babylonish woman who represented the evil and mesmeric tendencies of mortal mind. But Christian Science, as revealed to Mary Baker Eddy, and by her to the world, shows us that there is no mystery, no occultism, in the one and only Mind, which is God. In that Mind are to be found only the clarity, the open revealment, of divine ideas, wisdom, intelligence, and pure goodness.

While disdaining the superstition that believes in occultism, and its seeming power over the ignorant, the human mind takes secret pride in its own mental acumen, its intellectual apprehension of and acquiescence in the facts revealed by spiritual Science. It is particularly inclined to set up what might be called a spiritual hierarchy excluding all but those it deems the elect. For these reasons the human mind is often found rebelling against what that great metaphysician, St. Paul, has called "the simplicity that is in Christ." It rebels against the demand this simplicity makes for complete self-surrender, not only surrender of all mental qualities unlike the Christ, but of the mind itself which claims to exist apart from the Mind of Christ, Truth.

Consideration of these two aspects of the human mind leads to an intelligent explanation of those interesting statements of the prophet Isaiah: "And the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I cannot; for it is sealed: and the book is delivered to him that is not learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I am not learned." In no plainer language can it be stated that it is neither the learning nor the ignorance of the human mind that visions the Christ, but the pure spiritual sense which sees God as One and All, knowing only His own omniscience and His own simplicity of goodness.

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