Articles

Probably no question ever asked is fraught with such profound and universal import to humanity as is the question once put to Jesus by a student of the law in these words: "Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" The question occurs in an incident related in the tenth chapter of Luke's Gospel. Jesus made no direct answer, but by a counter-question drew from the student his own knowledge as to what rule the law prescribed upon the subject of gaining eternal life.

Since the year of our Lord 1866, during which time Christian Science has been urging its sublime promptings upon the Christian thought of mankind, it has been dispersing, both by the noiseless processes of patient labor and by the hammer-blows of ringing conviction, the tendency of the human mind to hold the wonderful operations of God's law outside the pale of rationality. As the marvels and miracles wrought by Moses, Elijah, and Christ Jesus were projected against the history of the world, it was not the divine design that human judgment should ever render these signs of God's nearness invalid or perpetually inaccessible to comprehension; nevertheless, they have seemed, throughout the slow file of centuries, to stand like cliffs which, rising suddenly out of a weltering waste of sea, offer no harbor to the wind-blown skiff.

Out of the deeps of experience come the words of the psalmist: "Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved. " But how many there are whose feelings are being perpetually troubled so that they find no stability nor peace, because they have not yet acknowledged God as the sustaining power.

In the Gospel of Matthew, wherein it is recorded that Jesus addressed the people about him from a hillside in Galilee, the world reads precepts simple and tender in the spirit of their ministration, yet so exalted in ideal that they promise to cut away, in their performance, all the selfish sin of human kind. Among the activities which Jesus defines as blessed by the Father, stands one which speaks great quietness of heart: "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

It is sometimes said by the critics of Christian Science that it is like Neoplatonism and "Berkeleyism," etc. , but these undemonstrable human theories are very different from it, and a patient study of Christian Science enables one to perceive in what way they differ.

Dr. Johnson was doubtless right when he said, "Every man has something to do which he neglects; every man has faults to conquer which he delays to combat.

The question of questions to mankind —the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other —is the ascertainment of the place which man occupies in nature, and of his relation to the universe of things. Whence has our race come? what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature's power over us? to what good are we tending? — these are the problems which present themselves anew and with undiminished interest to every man born into the world.

The one thing that has been accepted by mankind at large, and held as inevitable, is death. Death has not only been regarded as unavoidable, but it has been given the sacredness of a divine decree.

THE story of the healing of Naaman from leprosy, besides the very obvious lesson of the necessity for humility, presents one or two points of special interest to the Christian Scientist; for from it we learn that the human mind was the same in far-away lands and bygone ages as it is in our midst to-day; and that antagonism to any message of Truth which does not come in expected ways, or fit in with preconceived ideas, has always been, as it is now, one of its phases. That "it is the unexpected which happens" is a well-known saying; and the history of God's revelation of Himself to mankind seems to justify it, for it is certainly true that such revelation has invariably come through most unexpected channels.

In the legend of "King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table" it is said that Arthur was a mere babe when his father died, and being surrounded by enemies, to ensure his safety he was hidden away; so that many thought the babe had died. The country was devastated by wars, murders, and robberies, and no man's life was safe from his enemies.