The spiritual dynamic of the Christian Science movement is its youth. Not its young people—but the purity, thrust, and agelessness of its evangelistic purpose. It undertakes to do no less than awaken mankind to the vibrant unity and beauty of spiritual ideas through God's healing Christ.
This purpose makes its rousing demand on young and old alike. The challenge to our movement today is epitomized by the impersonal attack of the anti-Christ on this very vitality of our mission. Actually, it is not so much an attack as a reaction. It constitutes an aggressive reaction to the dawning recognition of our unity—specifically in this context the unity between our immortal childlikeness and our spiritual maturity. The lying suggestions of the anti-Christ claim to reverse this unity through polarization. They involve the polarizing of human opinion toward two equally mythical extremes. I term this "swaddling clothes/graveclothes" thinking.
In Science and Health Mrs. Eddy opens her chapter entitled "Creation" with these words: "Eternal Truth is changing the universe. As mortals drop off their mental swaddling-clothes, thought expands into expression."Science and Health, p. 255; The need to drop off our "mental swaddling-clothes" is no less necessary than Jesus' command that Lazarus be loosed from his graveclothes. Jesus was already seeing through the belief of mental swaddling bands when as a twelve-year-old he exchanged searching questions with the doctors in the temple. And the burial shroud discarded in his own tomb had been put off mentally many times during his ministry when the age-old fears and hatreds of the world sought without success to envelop and to draw him down to their level of illusion.
