Articles

CHRIST JESUS said in his Sermon on the Mount, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. " Our starting point, then, as individuals, is acceptance of the present perfection of man in God's likeness, regardless of the conditions which at the moment may appear to surround us or attach themselves to us.

Referring to the experience of the children of Israel who were delivered from bondage in Egypt and led through the wilderness, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" ( p. 566 ), "So shall the spiritual idea guide all right desires in their passage from sense to Soul, from a material sense of existence to the spiritual, up to the glory prepared for them who love God.

There is a yearning in the heart of every man to know more about his true being and to gain a sense of peace and quiet away from the turmoil of material living. Perhaps the remedy for health outside of material means is being sought, perhaps release from disappointment is calling for some satisfactory answer, or maybe that everlasting quest for God, in which every mortal finds himself engaged during his mental pilgrimage, is stirring in one's consciousness.

In the face of graphic reports from the war areas, spiritual discernment is needed to meet the unreal picture of conflict with clearness of vision as taught in Christian Science. Apathy is a common enemy, which needs to be destroyed in the individual consciousness.

In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes on page 365 , "If the Scientist reaches his patient through divine Love, the healing work will be accomplished at one visit, and the disease will vanish into its native nothingness like dew before the morning sunshine. " We know that by his realization of divine Love the Master quickly healed the sick, and that our Leader's healing work was of this nature —the instant dismissal of error through the realization of divine Love.

The true mission of Christian Science is to heal, to destroy fear, sin, and ignorance, through spiritual understanding of God. To realize is to make real; and to eliminate that which appears to be real, but is not because it is not of God's creating, is to prove its nothingness.

A vigorous declaration of truth is the beginning of victory, and victory comes by grappling with error until its nothingness is seen. Apathy claiming that this present warfare is not ours as individuals, that we can succeed by ignoring error in the struggle for righteousness, that we can avoid actual combat by a complacent security in human good, even the glib assertion that there is no warfare—this apathy must be annihilated if we would claim a victory over evil.

It is sometimes said, by those unfamiliar with the teachings of Christian Science, that this teaching lacks a theological basis, and for this reason it should not be considered on a par with Christian religion. All students of Scripture will agree that the Founder of Christianity, Christ Jesus, upheld but one standard for his true followers.

It is a matter of record in the Bible that the children of Israel were at the borders of the promised land in somewhat over a year's time after their departure from Egypt, but it was forty years in all before their "little ones," now become the elders, entered it. The tarrying appears to have been not of God's doing but mankind's own sense of taking plenty of time to progress, for in Deuteronomy we have this statement: "So ye abode in Kadesh many days, according unto the days that ye abode there.

The call to arms is a call to action. The armor of the Christian Scientist is Truth, with which he defends himself from the attacks of error.