Science And Health, the textbook of Christian Science, has been rightly termed by its author, Mary Baker Eddy, the key to the Scriptures because it reveals the spiritual significance of the Bible in both word and incident. On page 320 of this textbook Mrs. Eddy writes: "Metaphors abound in the Bible, and names are often expressive of spiritual ideas. The most distinguished theologians in Europe and America agree that the Scriptures have both a spiritual and literal meaning." And she adds, "The one important interpretation of Scripture is the spiritual."
If the Bible were to be accepted only literally, one might be led to believe that God is a distant, personal entity who is separated from man, but who communicates with him by means of supernatural intervention or message. In Christian Science, however, we see that God, or divine Love, in His infinite allness is divinely natural and that every manifestation of Spirit should be recognized and accepted as the natural expression of God's ever-presence. The Psalmist wrote (Ps. 91:11, 12): "He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone." What are the angels of His presence? A false theological sense would materialize what is really a beautiful and metaphysical concept. Christian Science teaches that angels are divine ideas, intuitive inspirations, that are and should be perpetually in evidence when one discerns and demonstrates his true selfhood as the very emanation of divine Mind.
Scientifically speaking, angels are not spiritual entities carrying divine messages to mortals, although in a certain relative sense the angels of God, or Mind's spiritual concepts, may seem to pass from Mind to man. Actually, the unfoldment of Mind's spiritual ideas appears as man's true being and in that inseparable oneness with God, even as Paul declared to the Hebrews (12:22). "Ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels." In further definition our textbook says (pp. 298, 299) "Angels are not etherealized human beings, evolving animal qualities in their wings; but they are celestial visitants, flying on spiritual, not material, pinions. Angels are pure thoughts from God, winged with Truth and Love, no matter what their individualism may be. Human conjecture confers upon angels its own forms of thought, marked with superstitious outlines, making them human creatures with suggestive feathers; but this is only fancy. It has behind it no more reality than has the sculptor's thought when he carves his 'Statue of Liberty,' which embodies his conception of an unseen quality or condition, but which has no physical antecedent reality save in the artist's own observation and 'chambers of imagery.'"
