This Series Of Articles will be unusual in a number of ways. First of all, its roots can be found in a statement from the Christian Science Board of Directors in the June 2006 Journal and in extensive discussions among members of the Board over the last several years.
All five Board members will be contributing articles to the series, along with a few other officers and senior managers of The Mother Church. The series will be initiated in January by a message from the Board and a listing of the authors and topics to be found each month beginning in February.
Also, the series comes at what many feel is a rather unusual time—a time of sizeable challenges that are no longer confined to distant regions, but are worldwide in scope. The world clearly needs now the focused prayer and healing that flows out from a renewed, vital, and unified Christian Science movement.
The title for this group of ten articles will be "Second-Century Christian Science: Depth, Dimension, Demonstration." From the beginning of the project, a primary aim has been to help increase Christian Scientists' own recognition of what Mary Baker Eddy termed "the majesty of Christian Science" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 188), its vast dimensions and divine purpose, and therefore its imperative demands on us all.
A barrage of animal magnetism and specific malpractice through recent decades might at first glance appear to have weakened the kind of strong convictions and total support for this "greatest and holiest of all causes" (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 177) that was so characteristic of its early workers. Sometimes the attack seems to have left Christian Scientists thinking too much about themselves. They have perhaps had concerns about their personal healing ability rather than feeling sustained and impelled by the breathtaking new views that come with revelation, spiritual experience, and its healing power for the whole world. Both young and old have at times been overly self-critical, and critical of the movement, feeling somewhat apologetic about "metaphysics," drawn toward the supposed powers of medicine, or marginalized by a world that has "passed them by."
An imposed, mesmeric state of thought obviously does not have the power it claims. (You'll find more on the primary mesmeric source of such feelings in the article "Who Shall Be Greatest?" in this issue.) Waking up, we can't help being aware of all that is being divinely given to us now, as certainly as when it was first discovered by Mary Baker Eddy. We can't help feeling the spiritual momentum and the immense practical effects of this Science of Christianity in its second century.
As the statement by the Board of Directors (see the June 2006 issue) reminded us: "Mrs. Eddy spoke of Divine Science as the Comforter that Jesus promised, as the 'final revelation of the absolute divine Principle of scientific mental healing' (see Science and Health, pp. 55, 107), the leaven of Truth to world thought, mankind's ultimate defense from pandemics, from extremes in human behavior and weather, from materialistic systems of religion and medicine, even from material existence itself. She wrote that '... the majesty of Christian Science teaches the majesty of man,' and she demonstrated its destiny through her life and life's work—to encircle the globe, to embrace all humanity with genuine spiritual healing."
This very special series of Journal articles for 2010 tells us of the spiritual revelation that has already come, and which will continue to be demonstrated and fulfilled in these times.
