The ancient Greek looked longingly for the Olympiad; the Chaldee watched the appearing of a star, to him no higher revelation than the horoscope hung out upon empyrean. But the meek Nazarene, the scoffed of all scoffers, said: "Ye can discern the face of the sky, and how much more should you discern the sign of these times;" and he looked at the ordeal of a perfect Christianity, hated by sinners.
To kindle all minds with a common sentiment of regard the new idea that comes welling up from infinite Truth needs to be understood. The seer of this period should be a sage. Small streams are noisy and rush precipitately in torrents; babbling brooks run to the river, and the river rises in storms to demolish bridges and flood cities. But the still small voice of truth comes to our recognition slowly and silently, changing our natures in its course, and ending in prayer and benediction.
When the keys of thought have been fully swept by some master hand whose mind is a moral musician, their tones at length touch the people's ear, are heard, and the harmony is half acknowledged— the public sentiment is aroused and all are liable to be borne on the current of feeling. Then should men retire temporarily from the tumult to the silent culture of every right idea, and the quiet practice of every duty. After the noise and stir of contending sentiments cease, and the flames fade away on the mount of revelation, we read more clearly the tablets of truth, and write them on the heart.
Humility is the stepping-stone to a higher recognition of Deity, whereby we discern the divine power of Truth and Love to heal the sick. Pride is ignorance, and those assume most who have least wisdom or experience, and they steal from their neighbor because they have so little of their own. The signs of these times portend a long night to the traveler, when we remember that God is just, and the total depravity of mortals, alias mortal mind, must first be seen, and then it must be subdued and recompensed by justice, that eternal attribute of Truth. To-day we behold but the first faint beams of a more spiritual Christianity that embraces a deeper and broader philosophy, and a more rational and divine healing. The time approaches when divine Life, Truth, and Love, shall be found alike the remedy for sin, sickness and death, and man's saving Principle, the Christ, learned through Christian Science.
Man's probation after death is the necessity of his immortality; for good dies not, and evil is self-destructive, therefore evil must be mortal. If man should not progress after death, but should remain in error, he would be inevitably destroyed—self-annihilated. "They are those upon whom the second death hath no power," who progress here and hereafter out of evil, their mortal element, and into good that is immortal—thus laying off the material beliefs that war against Spirit, and putting on the spiritual elements of goodness, purity and Love.
The Theology and Materia medica of Jesus were one, and this divine unit of Truth that healed the sick and cleansed from sin, is the only mental method of healing that we shall vindicate, and engrave on its standard, Christian Science.
While we entertain decided views as to the best method for elevating the race physically, morally and spiritually, and shall express these views as duty demands, we shall claim no especial gift from our divine origin, or any supernatural power; for we hold that good is more natural than evil, and that spiritual understanding, even the true knowledge of God, imparts the only power to heal, and should demonstrate in our lives the power of Truth and Love. The lessons we learn of divine science are applicable to all the needs of man, and Jesus taught them for this very purpose, and his demonstration hath taught us that, "through his stripes"—his bitter experience—and his divine science reduced to the understanding is man healed and saved. No opinions of Gnostic, Pantheist or Spiritualist, enter our line of thought or action. Drugs, inert matter, we never recommend, since mind is more potent than they to govern the body. Hygiene, manipulation, or mesmerism is not our medicine; the Principle of our cure is God, unerring and immortal Mind. And wherefore? Because we have learned that the erring or mortal thought holds in itself all sin, sickness and death, and imparts these states to the body; while the supreme and perfect Mind, as seen in the Truth of being, antidotes and destroys those material elements of error.
Since God is supreme and omnipotent, Materia medica, hygiene and animal magnetism are impotent, and their only efficacy is in deluding reason, denying revelation and dethroning Deity. The tendency of mental healing is to uplift mankind, but when this method is perverted it is "Satan let loose." The silent malpractice of an evil mind working out its own designs of mortal malice, masked in silent mental arguments and the subtle influences of mesmerism, the age has yet to learn that, to certain idiosyncracies, is more fatal to health and morals than the most deadly drugs and the more open enticements to sin. The mind imbued with purity, Truth and Love is the most potent and desirable remedial agent on the earth when this mind is instructed in the science of metaphysical healing. But the evil mind, that uses its developed powers to silently produce sin, suffering and death, is the highest mental attenuation of evil, and the depraved counterfeit of the divine Mind that silently heals and saves man. At this period there is a marked effort of the above class of minds to plant mental healing on the basis of evil and malpractice, while they suppress this fact, and call their method, Science. All mental science is Christian Science that bases its power to heal only on its power to do good.
Dear reader, the purpose of our paper is the desire of our heart, namely, to bring to many a household hearth health, happiness and increased power to be good, and to do good. To brighten so pure a hope will be to aid our prospect of fulfilling it, through your kindly patronage of the Journal of Christian Science, of which this is our first issue, and for which we are needing funds to establish its permanent publication.
