Except for the self-oblivious love of, Mary Baker Eddy and her undauntable trust in God, followed by the Godreliant faith of a small number of her early students, there would not now be the farflung movement of Truth, the evangelizing, healing activity of Christian Science.
Some who heard Mrs. Eddy in the early days of her discovery were only half ready to follow her teachings, and hence were but semiactive. Those, however, who knew their God and were strong did exploits, holding fast the foundation of a living faith which enabled men to believe and understand and be healed and saved. Like the Discoverer, Founder, and revelator of Christian Science, they kept before them the vision of the Christ, Comforter, its tender ministry, its power of preservation, and grasped in some degree what their Leader meant when she said in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp. 226, 227), "I saw before me the awful conflict, the Red Sea and the wilderness; but I pressed on through faith in God, trusting Truth, the strong deliverer, to guide me into the land of Christian Science, where fetters fall and the rights of man are fully known and acknowledged."
It is interesting to think what it means to have the rights of man fully known and acknowledged. The rights of each individual! Not his beliefs, nor the beliefs of others about him, but his actual rights established —his integrity, dignity, holiness, activity, security. In "the land of Christian Science" these rights are established. They are acknowledged. They are ever facts. In order to see these established rights humanly manifested, the fetters of mortal belief must fall before the knowledge of man's God-given dominion; for the man of God's creating is not fettered. The removing of these fetters, the pulling down of the strongholds of false beliefs—citadels of fear, hate, greed, arrogance, the miseries resultant from ignorance of God or ignoring of God—can never be accomplished by putting off until tomorrow the applied power of understanding prayer.
