Articles

Under the provisions of the Manual of The Mother Church, in Boston, Mass. , Christian Science churches have for years been privileged to adopt their own form of government, but our Leader's brief and significant proclamation to Christian Scientists throughout the world, contained in the issue of the Sentinel of May 22, 1909, "In Christian Science each branch church shall be distinctly democratic in its government," stipulates that the particular form shall be democratic, and makes pertinent the consideration of the question of democracy as applied to the conduct of church organization.

Most of us are familiar with the picture, so dear to the hearts of Christian Scientists, called "Daniel's Answer to the King. " The artist has portrayed the moment when the king, at whose command Daniel has been cast into the den of lions, comes, after a sleepless night, to see whether the captive is still alive.

Among the pearls found along life's pathway there is one of great price, and that is a healing consciousness. For centuries this pearl had been lost sight of, and when Christian Science found it, it was buried beneath an accumulation of worldly wisdom, pride, superstition, bigotry, religious intolerance, sensuality, "faith without works," unbelief, and a hundred other erroneous theories and opinions.

John records a very remarkable saying of Jesus: "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. " This declaration strikes us with tremendous significance.

Throughout Christendom at least, humanity believes in the efficacy of prayer. There may not be that universal reliance upon this divine agency which could be reasonably expected among a people who profess to know and serve the true God, but to a certain extent they confirm their belief in the power of prayer by resorting to it in times of great need.

THE Greek concept of deity gives no hint of an abiding, living religious faith which means a life-giving power springing from the consciousness of the indwelling of one God. Instead, their concept was pantheistic—of many gods that dwell in things, all man-made and man-endowed.

CHRISTIAN SCIENTISTS look upon the modern newspaper quite differently from what they did in the old thought. Anything like the exploitation of evil is so foreign to their religious teachings that the publication of sensational items detailing disorders of any kind, grates upon their sensibilities.

IN "Blair's Rhetoric" the opinion is expressed that the most sublime sentence in all literature is that in Genesis: "God said, Let there be light: and there was light. " This book was first published in 1783, in Scotland, and the natural sciences, so called, since then have been quite busily at work to change the image which that wonderful sentence presents to thought, a change which mainly concerns, however, the details of the deific processes of creation.

MATERIALISM , says that life is a phenomenon of matter: idealism that it is a phenomenon of mind or spirit. Christian idealism says that the life-principle is the divine Mind or Spirit.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE is not a mysterious, occult human philosophy, it is the plain, practical knowledge of the divine law of being, as taught and demonstrated by Christ Jesus. It is simplicity itself to the children, who readily adjust their thoughts to its teaching and prove its helpfulness in times of trouble.