Christ Jesus declared, "Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away."Mark 13:31. With like faith Mary Baker Eddy wrote, "If the world were in ashes, the contents of 'Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures' would remain immortal." The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 178.
Such faith demands of their followers both vision and action in support of it. Our Leader herself gave decades of God-inspired labor to the founding of a church organization that should preserve the revelation of Christian Science in all its purity for the centuries to come. In the same way, she took every wise step available to her to safeguard the integrity of the "precious volume" which, along with the Bible, would serve as the Church's permanent pastor "on this planet."See Retrospection and Introspection, p. 37; Miscellaneous Writings, p. 383.
From the moment she began teaching in 1870, Mrs. Eddy gave careful consideration to protecting her writings from misappropriation and misuse by the undisciplined human mind. She revised Science and Health a number of times "to give a clearer and fuller expression of its original meaning." Science and Health, p. 361. For a few years she employed a literary adviser "so as to avail myself of his criticisms of my statement of Christian Science, which criticisms would enable me to explain more clearly the points that might seem ambiguous to the reader." Miscellany, p. 317.She gave long, searching thought to the problem of how to present the Christian Science textbook in translation without diminishing its metaphysical precision. And she paid increasing attention to the part that copyright could play in the legal protection of her demonstration in presenting Christian Science to the world.
