It is an apparently audacious, majestic, sweeping statement that Mary Baker Eddy, the Founder of Christian Science, makes when she writes in the Message to the Mother Church for 1902: "Christian Science stills all distress over doubtful interpretations of the Bible; it lights the fires of the Holy Ghost, and floods the world with the baptism of Jesus. It is this ethereal flame, this almost unconceived light of divine Love, that heaven husbands in the First Commandment." Message for 1902, p. 5.
Yet for someone who has had spiritual experience that flows from Christian Science, it is a statement that seems, simply, true.
Christian Science does light "the fires of the Holy Ghost" because it makes known the sheer reality of God, Spirit. The Scriptural words have been on the page for generations: "Ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God." Rom. 8:15, 16. But Christian Science breaks through the mesmeric impression of the material senses that would have us forever taking the measure of ourselves within a material world. This assumption of material reality so limits and voids people's understanding of God that there is no serious understanding of what it would mean for man to be made in God's image, the child of Spirit. Because of prevailing mental assumptions about the way things are, the words don't open up, don't live. But Christian Science causes them to live, and it gives back to us the revolutionary power of the Bible. Scientific Christianity doesn't impose yet another personal or academic theory on the Scriptures; it truly discerns what underlies them and what has been the source of their force and significance for humanity.
