I was recently having a conversation with two friends. They each spoke warmly of the pastors of their churches and said how much the pastors' insights into the Scriptures had meant to them. I, too, turn to the "pastor" of my church, but it is a different kind of pastor than people usually think of when they use that term.
As a Christian Scientist, I've long turned for spiritual guidance to the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. In fact, Mrs. Eddy, in a remarkable innovation designed to preserve the purity of her discovery, established these two books as the impersonal pastor for her Church. Like many, I've found actual healing in the spiritual understanding of God and of man's relation to Him that these two books have given me. This points to something that my two friends and I share in common—an acknowledgment of the underlying spiritual message of the Bible. It's the deep spiritual sense of the Scriptures that I find revealed through Science and Health.
Jesus often called upon his listeners to think of God's love for them in spiritual terms, in terms that would bring about actual reform and spiritual love in their lives. His teachings show how, step by step, we can prove that man's real nature is not the material, sinful personality that mortals seem to be.
