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In the tender story of the Prodigal Son, as told by that old-time physician and metaphysician, Luke, there is a portion of a sentence that has always challenged my attention and demanded careful consideration and study since I have read and studied the Scriptures in the light which Christian Science throws upon them, for the words contained therein seem to me to be pregnant with deep meaning, and helpful to all who are trying to apply the lesson of the great parable practically. In the seventeenth verse of the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St.

How little we realize what we owe to the past for the things we enjoy to-day. It is wonderful and most interesting to look back and note the changes through which the human mind has passed during the steady and unfaltering tread of centuries, from the beginning down to the present time.

The crimes of the tongue are words of unkindness, of anger, of malice, of envy, of bitterness, of harsh criticism, gossip, lying, and scandal. Theft and murder are awful crimes, yet in any single year the aggregate sorrow, pain, and suffering they cause in a nation is microscopic when compared with the sorrows that come from the crimes of the tongue.

This word Truth seems a mystery to many, when first taking up the study of Christian Science. There should be no mystery about it.

Obedience , although universally recognized as the watchword of progress in the line of material effort, is very imperfectly understood in its larger spiritual meaning; and because of this indefinite apprehension, many well-disposed men, like Saul and Marcus Aurelius, have been servants of evil when they thought they were following good. To be obedient is to do right; to do right is to do one's duty, and to do one's duty, according to Scripture, is "to know God," hence, to be truly obedient is "to know God.

It means much to be willing to make our sacrifices to win our way homeward or heavenward. Purity, perfection, virtue, and goodness are realized only through the law of sacrifice.

Aside from the "greater works" of Christian Science in healing sin and sickness, there is probably no one phase of its teaching which is doing more to dignify and ennoble human life, than the elimination from human affairs which it is gradually effecting, and the total annihilation which it promises, of the element of chance, or the purely accidental and casual. That there is such an element playing a large part in our ordinary conduct of affairs, must be apparent to the most superficial observer.

The following question asked by honest investigators, comes often to the ear of the Christian Scientist, "If Christian Science be demonstrable, and if, as you aver, it be the self-same religion practised by Jesus the Christ and by his disciples, why did they not leave to us precise and formulated rules of practice?" To which the Christian Scientist replies: Jesus' teaching was by object-lessons and by word of mouth, and was treasured up and afterwards given to the world by his loving disciples. He did not call upon the scribes to preserve them in archives, but they were allowed to take root and grow in the hearts of his hearers.

From various pulpits and in the press we are being told that Christian Science—the religion in which God is the only healer—is wrong; that it is a mistake to take Bible promises too seriously; that it is folly to draw practical conclusions from the premise of God's allness: that Christ does not heal any more except through drugs and surgery, and so forth. Physicians of every school, in all kinds of practice, are continually finding themselves up against a stone wall, so to speak, which they cannot get over, or through, or around and confess themselves helpless, if they are honest, and the majority of them are.

Editor of The Macon News. In the issue of your paper of February 3, you publish another sermon by Rev.