SCIENCE AND HEALTH WITH KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES "... to gyve science & helthe to his puple..." Luke 1:77 (Wyclif)
In the August Journal some excerpts were given from a new book, The Bible and Bibles in America, edited by Ernest S. Frerichs and published by Scholars Press and Fortress Press. The book is the first volume of a scholarly series entitled The Bible in American Literature, sponsored by the Society of Biblical Literature. Robert Peel, as an author of several books on Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science, was asked to contribute a chapter on Mrs. Eddy's book Science and Health, and the previous installment contained excerpts from that chapter dealing with the textbook's early publishing history and mixed public reception. This month we are reprinting further excerpts from the same chapter. These describe the place of the Bible and Science and Health in a Christian Scientist's study and worship. They also touch on the textbook's prophetic insight into the future.
Christian Science is first of all a study, and Science and Health remains its authoritative textbook. Christian Scientists are apt to speak of themselves as "students of Christian Science," and normally they devote time each day to studying the Bible and the textbook which they believe helps them to relate "the inspired Word of the Bible" [Science and Health, p. 497] more practically—more "scientifically" even—to their lives.
Thus Christian Science is also a "practice"— a way of life as well as a way of thinking and praying. In one sense every Christian Scientist is expected to be a "practitioner" of his faith, although the term is ordinarily reserved for those who are devoting themselves full time to the ministry of healing. Truth is to be practically "demonstrated" through the regeneration and healing of human lives and bodies. Inspiration is to be validated by experience.
It was with this practical purpose that Mrs. Eddy and a small group of her students voted in 1879 "To organize a church designed to commemorate the word and works of our Master, which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing" [Church Manual, p. 17]. In its final form the resulting organization consisted of The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, together with its branch churches and societies around the world.
In 1895 Mrs. Eddy ordained the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as "pastor" of The Mother Church and its branches. She also instituted a system of weekly Bible Lessons covering twenty-six topics and composed of correlative passages from the Bible and the denominational textbook. The topics of these "lesson-sermons" occur twice a year; the passages to illustrate them are chosen afresh each time by a committee.
Thus, every Sunday, Christian Scientists who have been individually and daily studying a given lesson during the preceding week meet together as a congregation to hear it read as a sermon by two lay Readers. In every Christian Science church service throughout the world the same lesson is read on the same day and is introduced with the same explanation from the Christian Science Quarterly: "The Bible and the Christian Science textbook are our only preachers. We shall now read Scriptural texts, and their correlative passages from our denominational textbook; these comprise our sermon" [see Explanatory Note by Mrs. Eddy].
The rationale of this system of combined study and worship is clear, if unusual. Pulpit eloquence was to give way to spiritual education; ritual to shared understanding; outward sacraments to inner commitment; formal spoken prayers to silent prayer.
The Sunday service in a Christian Science church mingles something of the bare simplicity of the New England church services that Mrs. Eddy knew as a girl with a touch of the Quaker quietism and the Unitarian rationalism with which she came in friendly contact later. The midweek meeting, for which the First Reader in each church prepares a lesson composed of passages from the Bible and Science and Health on a topic of his own choosing, is chiefly known for the spontaneous "testimonies of healing" given by members of the congregation—and in this respect at least bears some resemblance to a Methodist testimony meeting. For Christian Scientists the midweek meeting is, in some sense, a witness to—and a test of—the spiritual effectiveness of the Sunday service. In the age-old controversy in regard to salvation by faith or by works, Mrs. Eddy committed her followers squarely to the position of James 2:18, "Shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works."
The central place of the Bible in this worship system is notable, although often overlooked because of its linkage with Science and Health. In few if any other churches is one-half of the sermon composed of readings from the Bible and preceded by an additional Scriptural reading. On the other hand, the authority given to Science and Health is also unmistakable and raises a question as to whether Christian Scientists give it equal authority with the Bible.
Certainly it has for them an authority at least equal to that which traditional Christians give the great historic creeds. But like those creeds it claims only to be making explicit what is inherent in the Scriptures—and to derive its authority directly from the Scriptures. Science and Health itself contains more than seven hundred quotations from the Bible, plus innumerable other references to Scriptural teachings, events, characters, figures of speech, textual and theological problems. Verbal echoes from the Bible abound throughout the book, often missed entirely by secular critics looking for influences on Mrs. Eddy's writing. Science and Health without the Bible would be, in its author's eyes, as anomalous as a key without a door to unlock.
In her 1902 revision of the textbook, Mrs. Eddy made two major changes. In the first place, she moved two chapters—"Prayer" and "Atonement and Eucharist"—up to the front of the book, thereby establishing at once the Christian spirit and theology which she considered essential to an understanding of the metaphysics that followed. The spirit is well illustrated in the following typical passage from the second chapter: "While we adore Jesus, and the heart overflows with gratitude for what he did for mortals,—treading alone his loving pathway up to the throne of glory, in speechless agony exploring the way for us,—yet Jesus spares us not one individual experience, if we follow his commands faithfully; and all have the cup of sorrowful effort to drink in proportion to their demonstration of his love, till all are redeemed through divine Love."
Characteristically, the sentences immediately preceding and following this passage introduce in an almost casual way a crucial theological point that is elaborated in various other contexts later in the book: "The divinity of the Christ was made manifest in the humanity of Jesus" and "The Christ was the Spirit which Jesus implied in his own statements: 'I am the way, the truth, and the life;' 'I and my Father are one.' This Christ, or divinity of the man Jesus, was his divine nature, the godliness which animated him."
In a later chapter entitled "Science of Being" this point is amplified, with the addition of metaphysical terms which further extend its meaning:
"The advent of Jesus of Nazareth marked the first century of the Christian era, but the Christ is without beginning of years or end of days. Throughout all generations both before and after the Christian era, the Christ, as the spiritual idea, —the reflection of God,—has come with some measure of power and grace to all prepared to receive Christ, Truth. Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and the prophets caught glorious glimpses of the Messiah, or Christ, which baptized these seers in the divine nature, the essence of Love. The divine image, idea, or Christ was, is, and ever will be inseparable from the divine Principle, God."
This in turn gains a further dimension from the answer to the question "What is God?" in the chapter "Recapitulation": "God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love."
The second change made in the 1902 revision was the addition of a final 100 page chapter entitled "Fruitage" and introduced by the words of Jesus: "Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." This was made up entirely of testimonials from people who had been healed simply by reading or studying Science and Health. The chapter includes healings of cancer, tuberculosis, heart disease, kidney ailments, broken bones, cataracts, eczema, alcoholism, insanity, and a host of other ills. They are not unlike the testimonials that have been published in the Christian Science periodicals monthly and weekly during the past one hundred years, except for the fact that Science and Health itself appears to have been the sole "practitioner" in each of these cases.
What is likely to strike the reader of this chapter, however, is how often the physical healing is presented as subordinate to an influx of light, a "new birth" or awakening to a fresh sense of life and its possibilities. Very often the chief gratitude expressed is for a higher understanding of God—and a deeper appreciation of the Bible. A frequent refrain is that the Bible is now a new book to the testifier. One woman writes that after her healing through her "illumined" study of Science and Health, the Bible became "my constant study, my joy, and my guide," and she continues: "The copy which I bought at the time of my healing is marked from Genesis to Revelation. It was so constantly in my hands for three years that the cover became worn and the leaves loose, so it has been laid away for a new one. Two and three o'clock in the morning often found me poring over its pages, which grew more and more sacred to me every day, and the help I received therefrom was wonderful, for which I can find no words to express my gratitude."
This biblical emphasis is possibly the aspect of Christian Science to which the least academic attention has been paid.
Mrs. Eddy told William Dana Orcutt in 1893 that it had always been her desire that her book should encourage more and more people to turn to the Bible. There was soon an interesting bit of practical evidence that it was doing just that. Recognizing how much the circulation of the Christian Science textbook was helping to stimulate the demand for Bibles, the Oxford University Press in 1894 agreed to furnish The Christian Science Publishing Society—and them alone— the much-desired Oxford India paper hitherto reserved for the printing of Bibles and Prayer Books, in order that Christian Scientists might have copies of their textbook with pages similar to those of the Bible as an aid in studying them together.
The world has been catapulted into a new age since the first edition of Science and Health appeared in 1875. Yet the woman who could write of the coming age, "The astronomer will no longer look up to the stars,—he will look out from them upon the universe ..." cannot be simplistically written off as a nineteenth-century religious fanatic.
When asked by a New York Herald reporter in 1901 what she thought of "modern material inventions," Mrs. Eddy replied, in part: "We use them, we make them our figures of speech. They are preparing the way for us." This was illustrated by her statement in an article, "The Christian Science Textbook," in which she wrote: "Hidden electrical forces annihilating time and space, wireless telegraphy, navigation of the air; in fact, all the et cetera of mortal mind pressing to the front, remind me of my early dreams of flying in airy space, buoyant with liberty and the luxury of thought let loose . . . ." To which she added that the "night thought . . . should unfold in part the facts of day, and open the prison doors and solve the blind problem of matter. The night thought should show us that even mortals can mount higher in the altitude of being. Mounting higher, mortals will cease to be mortal."
If this was not mere daydreaming, neither was it the Utopian vision of self-confident twentieth-century scientism. Beside it one must put Mrs. Eddy's stark pronouncement that earth will become "dreary and desolate" until "the final spiritualization of all things," with her further less-than-roseate prediction: "This material world is even now becoming the arena for conflicting forces. . . . The breaking up of material beliefs may seem to be famine and pestilence, want and woe, sin, sickness, and death, which assume new phases until their nothingness appears. . . . This mental fermentation has begun, and will continue until all errors of belief yield to understanding The more destructive matter becomes, the more its nothingness will appear, until matter reaches its mortal zenith in illusion and forever disappears."
Mrs. Eddy's conviction that "incredible good and evil elements" were coming to the surface in the relatively stable world of the late nineteenth century might be said to have pointed proleptically to a world that would include both the adventure of space exploration and the mushroom cloud of nuclear devastation. Long before 1914 she had broken with the optimistic American faith in automatic linear progress. There was room for Armageddon in her theology, and this decisively separates Christian Science from the success philosophies with which it has often been confounded.
Not that it has been free from the secularizing tendencies that have eroded the spiritual force of so much American religion. Mrs. Eddy's publisher in the early 1890s had warned, "When the founder of Christian Science is taken away, its Christianity will disappear with her." That has not happened. The position of authority given to the Bible and Science and Health in the Church of Christ, Scientist, has been crucial in preserving the guiding force of the original spiritual vision in the Christian Science movement. Over the years an occasional small segment of the movement has dropped away to pursue its own pragmatic or ideational goals, but by and large the church has held to the Christian ideals and disciplines spelled out by Science and Health and the Manual of The Mother Church [by Mrs. Eddy].
At the same time the ecumenical movement and the Christian healing movement have helped to abate old rigors of separation between Christian Science and the traditional churches. Mrs. Eddy expressed the hope that spiritual healing would increasingly spread to other denominations, and that has been notably the case in the past two or three decades. It is difficult to know how much direct or indirect influence Science and Health may have had in this development, but its concept of healing as a witness to the supremacy of spiritual power is certainly to be found in much of the interdenominational literature on the subject.
This point is made in an official publication of the Church of Christ, Scientist, issued in 1966, the centenary of Mrs. Eddy's "discovery" of Christian Science: "The healing of physical disease is one of the most concrete proofs that can be offered of the substantiality of Spirit. It is not of itself conclusive, and in the nature of things it cannot be offered under the conditions of controlled experiment. But in conjunction with all the other evidences of spiritual power furnished by Christianity understood as Science it offers a substantial challenge to materialistic assumptions."
The word "Science" used in this way remains an offense to many and an enigma to most. The audacity of its challenge to the sophisticated scientism of our age is beyond the scope of this article. Its relation to the challenge of New Testament Christianity has already been touched upon. The challenge it has for Christian Scientists goes back to Mrs. Eddy's "basic vision." This is brought out in a very simple passage in an article written for the centenary of the publication of Science and Health:
" 'Catch the vision that wrote the book,' Christian Scientists in the early days sometimes said to those who were just beginning to study Science and Health.
"It was plain to these Christian Scientists that a tremendous new understanding of reality had-brought the book into being. Through reading it they, too, were catching a glimpse of this reality. So assuring, self-evident, and powerful was this new view of life that it seemed perfectly natural for sickness of many years' duration and even the shadow of death to melt away as part of some previous ignorance."
To the extent that any Biblically inspired book produces such results, it may be said to participate in the spirit of the tremendous announcement that issued from the throne of God in Revelation 21: "Behold, I make all things new."
[End of second installment]
