From the summit of undeviating devotion to the Word, from the vantage point of ever-mounting proofs of its potency, Mary Baker Eddy asks the world this rousing question (Poems, p. 75): "Felt ye the power of the Word?" Years before, when the shadow of death threatened, her lifelong love of the Bible turned her instinctively to God's Word. As she read one of the Master's healings, she straightway arose healed. This was the discovery of Christian Science and was followed by those remarkable years in which she founded her church and the Christian Science movement and experienced the light, might, and glory always to be found in God's Word.
Her own direct access to the Word had been so telling that she yearned to make available to all the same holy experience of drinking straight from the living fountain. She was God-led to set forth her discovery in a textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." Later she revolutionized what the Christian world knows as the Sunday sermon, replacing the personal preacher and sermon with an impersonal pastor and a Lesson-Sermon. In making this significant change she wrote (The Mother Church by Joseph Armstrong, pp. 75, 76): "The Bible and 'Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures' shall henceforth be the Pastor of The Mother Church. This will tend to spiritualize thought. Personal preaching has more or less of human views grafted into it. Whereas the pure Word contains only the living, health-giving Truth."
Carefully selected texts from the Bible and correlative passages from her textbook present a sermon in the form of a Lesson, a Lesson to be studied daily, to be lived daily, then to be read and heard as the Sunday sermon in every Church of Christ, Scientist. Fidelity to the study of these Lessons in the Christian Science Quarterly is tremendously rewarding because of the inspiration, comfort, healing, and great spiritual growth which so surely result therefrom.
