Mary Baker Eddy

God’s Great Scientist

Volume II

Helen M. Wright

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Mary Baker Eddy: A New Look

Mary Baker Eddy: Church Manual & Church Universal & Triumphant

Mary Baker Eddy: God’s Great Scientist, Vol. I

Mary Baker Eddy: God’s Great Scientist, Vol. II

Mary Baker Eddy: God’s Great Scientist, Vol. III

Mary Baker Eddy ‘s Church Manual & Church Universal & Triumphant

If Mary Baker Eddy’s Manual Were Obeyed

America: Cradle for the Second Coming of the Christ

America: Cradle for the Second Coming of the Chris (second edition, paperback)

Star of Boston

Mary Baker Eddy Institute Letters

Mary Baker Eddy Reveals Your Divinity

Humanity’s Divinity

Made Whole Through Our Marriage To God

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“For the world to understand me in my true light, and life, would do more for our Cause than aught else could. This I learn from the fact that the enemy tries harder to hide these two things from the world than to win any other points.”

(Extract from Mary Baker Eddy 1893 letter to Edward A. Kimball. Collectanea, p. 111.)

“The united plan of the evil doers is to... keep Mary Baker Eddy as she is out of sight....”

(Extract from Mary Baker Eddy letter to Judge Hanna. Collectanea, p. 109.)

“All the people need, to love and adopt Christian Science, is a true sense of its founder. In proportion as they have found it, will our Cause advance.”

(We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, Vol. 1, p. 40. 1899 Mary Baker Eddy letter to student.)

“Whoever opens most the eyes of the children of men to see aright and to understand aright that IDEA ON EARTH that has best and clearest reflected by word or deed the divine Principle of man and the universe, will accomplish most for himself and mankind in the direction of all that is good and true.” (Extract from Mary Baker Eddy August 26th, 1902 letter to Judge Septimus J. Hanna. Early Collectanea.)

Dedicated to:

THE SPIRITUALLY—MINDED READER

AN EXAMINATION

of the

FIRST EDITION

SCIENCE and HEALTH’S

CHAPTER II:

IMPOSITION

and

DEMONSTRATION

EXPLANATORY NOTES:

ITALICS

Italics not appearing in the original are sometimes used in quotations, not to emphasize, but to identify that portion of the quote directly applicable to the point under discussion.

ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviations for titles of Mrs. Eddy’s writings are those used in the Concordance to Miscellaneous Writings and Works Other than Science and Health.

Six Days is the abbreviation for Mary Baker Eddy’s Six Days of Revelation by Richard Oakes.

EOF is the abbreviation for Essays and Other Footprints.

DCC is the abbreviation for Divinity Course and General Collectanea.

(Note: EOF and DCC were compiled and reproduced by Richard Oakes at the instigation of Gilbert C. Carpenter, Jr. CSB, of Providence, R.I.). Some rare Carpenter compilations are also quoted in the text: Items, Collectanea (original version), Miscellaneous Documents, Fragments.

References to current edition of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures are shown as (1910 ed.).

FIRST EDITION EXEGESIS

Mrs. Eddy did not capitalize “Science” in the first edition. However, in the quotes selected for this work, Science when referring to Mrs. Eddy’s discovery is capitalized to avoid confusion with the various natural sciences

Also, commas, where obviously superfluous—in conformity with the custom prevailing a century ago—have sometimes been omitted in the portions here extracted.

In an article to the Boston Journal, January 20, 1876, regarding the first edition, Mrs. Eddy wrote: “‘Science and Health’ bears the burden of many typographical errors.” The author of this book feels no purpose would be served in perpetuating obvious errors

CONTENTS

Volume II

Dedication	iv
Explanatory Notes	vi

Examination of First Edition of Science and Health
Chapter 11: Imposition and Demonstration

Preface	xiii
Introductory Statement	1
Note to Reader	1
Is the “I” Principle or Person?	2
Does Spirit Create Its Opposite, Matter?	2
No Necessity For Recreation or Procreation	3
Fundamental Necessity in Teaching	3
What the Great Red Dragon Signifies	4
Corporeal Sense of Creation “Cast Out”	5
Jesus’ Statements on Birth and Marriage	6
Mrs. Eddy’s Similar Statements	8
The Genius of a Divine Revelator	11
Who or What the Creator Is	12
Creation Wholly Mental and Spiritual	12
Mrs. Eddy’s Deep Meaning of Animal Magnetism	14
The Real Man-Woman Oneness	17
The Solution for the Human Race	18
Review of the Three Great Categories	19
The Operations of Birth Out of Matter	21
Understanding Levels, Obviates “Contradictions”	22

CHAPTER II: Imposition and Demonstration
Part I: Imposition

Imposition and Demonstration Deeply Spiritual	26
How It Works	27
Science Exposes Imposition	28
Persistence and Perseverance Required	29
The So-called Mind of Body	30
Boundless Love Expresses Itself as Man	33
Consciousness is Mind, God	33
We Are “Love, Life, and Truth” Now	36
“Man Is Never God”	36
Only One World	38
Material Shackles Fall Away	42
An Experience Showing Life Never in the Body	44
The Norwood and Armstrong Experiences	46
Matter Correctly Defined	48
Spiritual Awareness Annihilates Dualistic Beliefs	50
Generic Man (God), Not Divided	52
Our True Mind Has “The Seed Within Itself”	53

Part II: Demonstration

Self-renunciation of the Mortal Needed	61
Mrs. Eddy’s Understanding of Jesus	62
What the God-crowned Woman Symbolizes	62
Correlation of Bridegroom and Bride	63
Alice Orgain Explains Picture No. One	64
Science Successfully Faces All Problems	65
The Uplifting and Blessing of Calvin Frye	67
Spirituality and Sensuality Not Traveling Companions	68
What Men Really Saw Was the Word Made Flesh	70
Jesus’ Pioneer Work As the Way-Shower	72
Jesus’ Total Disposal of Life in Matter	75
Jesus’ Actual Conquest of Death	76
Mrs. Eddy’s Teaching Ahead of Its Time	77
Jesus the Great Exemplar	78
Jesus’ Proofs Made Him the “Last Adam”	80
Constancy of Purpose Necessary	82
The Adam Dream of Incompleteness	87
The Folly of Giving Identity to Sin	91
Her Faith in the Immortality of Her Teaching	93
Soul Reviewed	94
The Struggle With Sin’s Claim to Identity	96
“We Must Tell the Truth Concerning Sin”	98
Need for Work Input for Truth to Work	99
The On-going Example of Mrs. Eddy’s Fortitude	102
Signs of the Heart (Poem)	103
The Value of Sorrow	105
Progressive Dematerialization of Being	106
The Healing Love that Casts Out Fear and Hate	108
The Human Mind vs. God’s Own Knowing	109
Truth’s Operation in the Human Consciousness	110
The Enabling Qualities	112
Spiritual Insight	115
Man’s Nature, Not His Body, Deathless	118
Advanced Thinkers Give Us Support	120
In Conclusion	122
The First Edition the Highest	122
Woman (Science) Must Reach, Encompass, All Mankind	124
Mrs. Eddy Gave Much that Jesus Did Not	124
Mrs. Eddy’s Writings Her Successor	124
The Meaning of “the Spiritual idea”	125
She Brought Forth a “Man Child”	126
The Higher Mission of Woman, Science	128
Mrs. Eddy Completed the Work of Christ Jesus	129

PREFACE—Important.

Volume I of Mary Baker Eddy: God’s Great Scientist, is a prerequisite to this volume. It contains a discussion of Chapter 1, Natural Science, in Mrs. Eddy’s first edition of Science and Health. That first chapter, Natural Science, is extremely important. It lays the foundation for what will now be discussed in her second chapter, Imposition and Demonstration, with which this Volume 11 deals. Actually, of course, Mrs. Eddy’s first chapter, Natural Science, lays the groundwork for all that follows in her remarkable God-dictated “precious volume.”

In writing the first edition Mrs. Eddy began at the portals of heaven. This was perfectly natural since her great revelation had catapulted her whole thinking process into an entirely new realm—a spiritual divinely scientific realm.

Born of revelation’s zenith, her new spiritual vision resulted in spiritual declarations so far above the average human comprehension the publishers of her day twice rejected what she had written, saying they would not attempt to publish something they could not understand; this in spite of Mrs. Eddy having done her best to couch the new spiritually scientific ideas in understandable language—to adopt an idiom comprehensible to the mentality of the 1870’s.

The difficulty, of course, lay in Mrs. Eddy’s transformed viewpoint which translated man and the universe back into Spirit. Her great revelation and discovery had put her mind in tune with the Mind of God, infinite good, and caused it to move in the grooves of omnipotence—in the vast spiritual realm of the Mind that is Love.

The group discussion recorded in Volume I of Mary Baker Eddy: God’s Great Scientist, reveals how she called on her students and readers to consider with her the infinitude of spiritual reality. Before students could be on her wavelength and travel in the new spiritual dimensions which her thought was contemplating, she had to find a medium of communication by which to bridge the deep chasm that yawned between the vast spiritual realm that had opened up to her and the material standpoint of the world.

To convey to her listeners and readers how to reach her divinely subjective standpoint, how to exchange the wrong viewpoint for spiritual reality, was the problem that loomed before her. The spiritual facts were clear in her mind. The difficulty arose in trying to convey, in the limited terms of human language, the hereness, the nowness, of present perfection just awaiting humanity’s recognition. How could she awaken mankind to know that their real Mind was God?

To find the everyday terminology—or invent a new set of words through an exact system of capitalization—in order to convey the meaning of this infinite theme was necessary. The liberty she took “with capitalization in order to express the ‘new tongue’ has well-nigh constituted a new style of language” she tells us. And “the correct use of capital letters in composition caps the climax of the old ,new tongue”‘ (My. 317:23; 225:7). Christian Science requires a new language, God’s language. “Human language can repeat only an infinitesimal part of what exists” (1910 ed. 520:5).

Spirit being All, its meaning and language must be wholly spiritual. Therefore “the revelation, discovery, and presentation of Christian Science....became requisite in the divine order. For this she needed words. With the right words in the right places and order she knew she could nudge humanity a little closer to a comprehension of its present divinity.

With all her heart Mrs. Eddy yearned to take the things of reality, of divine Love—which through her revelation and discovery had become native to her thought—and translate them into a language “comprehensible by and adapted to the thought of the age in which we live” (1910 ed. 146:32).

Words were the God-given means. As someone has said, “Words are innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos.” Mrs. Eddy did just that. She made use of language’s most impressive and extraordinary quality or peculiarity, namely, its unlimited potential for expressing new thoughts and ideas. She found the right words; and with the right words in the right place she built a bridge across the gulf of outmoded religious beliefs, mysticism, vague emotional and haphazard thinking, to the heaven of spiritual understanding and reality.

It took 432 editions of Science and Health to complete this task.

As God’s recording scribe, she began the process in her Truth-bringing first edition which had been heralded by the “mighty angel,” of the Book of Revelation (10:1, 2). In this pioneering edition she reveals that opinions and false beliefs have made us believe we are man rather than Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, and Love—in other words, God, which shadows forth “man” or its idea.

This little volume, dear Reader, contains a group discussion of Mary Baker Eddy’s God-sent first edition’s second chapter: Imposition and Demonstration.

In this chapter, “Imposition and Demonstration,” we find the crux of the great revelation that came with the Second Coming of the Christ, in the writings of Mary Baker Eddy.

We learn in this chapter that as progress compels change, and Science pushes the centuries onward, we will awaken from the Adam dream. With this awakening the corporeal sense of creation or human birth is cast out. Mrs. Eddy, on page 56:12 (S&H 1910 ed.) equates human birth with the great red dragon that was “cast out” and shown “to be nothingness” (see p. 567:14-26 of the 1910 ed.).

May the following pages now send thee “like a bee, to gather honey out of flowers and weeds—the wheat, and the [unreal] tares; every garden is furnished with either, and so is ours.”

August, 1984 Helen Wright

A GR0UP DISCUSSION

VOLUME II OF THIS SERIES ON THE FIRST EDITION OF SCIENCE HEALTH CONCERNS ITSELF WITH AN EXAMINATION OF MRS EDDY’S SECOND CHAPTER, IMPOSITION AND DEMONSTRATION.

THE FOLLOWING FRIENDS PARTICIPATED IN THIS CLASS TAUGHT BY HELEN WRIGHT (THE MODERATOR):

ABRAHAM, ANNA, BESSIE, BILL, ELSIE, DANNY, FLORENCE, FRANCY, GRACE, JOHNNY, KATHLEEN, the two MARGY(s), MARIE, MOSES, ROCKY, ROOKIE, SALLY, TOMMY.

SUBSEQUENT VOLUMES WILL TAKE UP THE SUCCEEDING CHAPTERS.

INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT

NOTE TO READER:

This chapter continues the group discussion by the same students who took part in the examination of Mary Baker Eddy’s first edition Chapter 1, Natural Science, presented in Volume 1, of Mary Baker Eddy: God’s Great Scientist. Unless otherwise specified, all references in this chapter are to the first edition of Science and Health.

Moderator: We have come together to continue our examination of Mary Baker Eddy’s first edition of Science and Health. We will begin with a discussion of its second chapter: Imposition and Demonstration. Tommy, what stands out to you in the Imposition part of this Chapter II?

Tommy: She loses little time in getting to the heart of what she means by “imposition,” although there seems to be a slight attempt to veil her meaning by alluding to spiritualism, calling “spiritualists” gross materialists, etc. But it is not difficult to grasp her meaning, and see that it is consistent with what we found in our examination of Chapter 1, Natural Science, where she steadfastly maintained the fundamental error was the belief that we are man rather than Soul, God. “Man,” she maintained is Mind’s (God’s) expression or reflection. This Mind is your Mind. Here she states:

P. 66:1: A suffering, sinning, and dying condition such as must ever remain while the belief of Soul in body and Intelligence in man or matter remains, cannot be preferable to the sinless joy and perfect harmony that a recognition of Life as Spirit, possessing all beauty and good, without a single demand [for] pleasure, or pain of body confers; why so many called “spiritualists” are very gross materialists is because they make personality Spirit and the only conscious existence, and rejecting a personal God, make a God of persons, which is equally fatal to the science of being; persons called “spirits,” instead of Principle that is Spirit and Truth, are their trust, while a belief in “spirits” belongs to the darker ages, and is demonology.

Right on the second page of this Chapter 11 she states:

P. 65:15: When we are Spirit we shall have gained the high import of [Jesus’] statement, “I and the Father are one,” and shall find too, this oneness occasions no loss of identity, but that “I” signifies Spirit and not matter, Principle and not person, Soul and not body, even the Intelligence represented by all ideas, symbolizing harmony from the blade of grass to a star.

IS THE “I” PRINCIPLE OR PERSON?

Moderator: Then she says that the question at present is whether this “I” is Principle or person, Soul or body, God or man. Principle, she says, is the “I am,” or Soul—and remember how many times in Chapter 1, Natural Science, she reminded us that “we are Soul and not body.” “But where do we place the ‘I’?” she asks. “Is it Spirit in matter, Soul in body ... ?”

Abraham: Notice in the reference just read from page 65 that she says finding ourselves Spirit “occasions no loss of identity”; but people, generally, think that if they had not been born into matter they would have no identity. However, a fundamental teaching of Christian Science is that the belief of being born into matter, which in turn assigns to matter the power and prerogative of Spirit, is the very thing that causes man to become “the most absolutely weak and inharmonious creature in the universe” (1910 ed. 123:9).

DOES SPIRIT CREATE ITS OPPOSITE, MATTER?

Anna: In divine Science the belief that Spirit creates its opposite, matter, is seen to be an erroneous conclusion. Mrs. Eddy states:

Here is where Christian Science sticks to its text and other systems of religion abandon their own logic. Here also is found the pith of the basal statement, the cardinal point in Christian Science, that matter and evil (including all inharmony, sin, disease death) are unreal. [Sin was defined by Mrs. Eddy as the connubial relationship, according to a statement by Laura Sargent] Mortals accept natural science, wherein no species ever produces its opposite. Then why not accept divine Science on this ground? since the Scriptures maintain this fact by parable and proof asking, “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” “Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter .....”

Creation, evolution, or manifestation,—being in and of Spirit Mind—must be spiritual and mental. (Mis. 27.7).

NO NECESSITY FOR RECREATION OR PROCREATION

Moderator: Thank you, Anna. In our current edition, Mrs. Eddy makes the following statements:

Mortal thought...forms its offspring after human illusions....Mortals would procreate man and make God in their own image and likeness. What is the god of a mortal, but a mortal magnified?...God created all through Mind, and made all perfect and eternal. Where then is the necessity for recreation or procreation? (259:22; 140:29; 205:12).

Moses: Once having been alerted to the great spiritual fact that we are Soul and not body, God and not man, and “the body is but a reflex shadow of immortal Soul” (141:7) as she so forcefully spells it out in the first edition, you see that same message on nearly every page of the current textbook.

FUNDAMENTAL NECESSITY IN TEACHING

Moderator: Yes, Moses, I have found that to be the case. But time and patience are necessary. “The greatest reform, with almost unutterable truths to translate, must wait to be transfused into the practical and to be understood in the ‘new tongue’” My. 306:12). “That teacher does most for his students who divests himself most of pride and self, and by reason thereof is able to empty his students’ minds of error [the crucial error of believing in the necessity of procreation and that man is the father of man] that they may be filled with Truth” (Ret. 84:19)

The immortal words of Jesus who had much to say on this subject were articulated in a decaying language, and then left to the providence of God.” Mary Baker Eddy was to interpret them in her valiant effort “to awaken the dull senses, intoxicated with pleasure or pain, to the infinite meaning of those words.” (See Mis. 100:2.) The war between Science and the senses is a revolutionary struggle.

WHAT THE GREAT RED DRAGON SIGNIFIES

Before we start with Imposition and Demonstration does anyone have a question concerning the ground we covered in Chapter 1, Natural Science?

Elsie: Yes. In those sessions we talked about Mrs. Eddy’s “hiding” her teaching in fulfillment of Jesus’ parable of the “leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.” I am still not clear what it was that she hid. Could it be stated directly, I mean bluntly, exactly what she hid?

Moderator: Yes, indeed, it can be! It is really the vital question the tenaciously held belief in human birth. It has long been avoided because it is still extremely unpopular; but sincere seekers of truth cannot avoid facing it. What we have to avoid is stating the truth too bluntly. All is lost if the truth so shocks our listener that he runs for cover.

Who would like to expand upon the answer to Elsie’s question?

Abraham: Mrs. Eddy said: “Mankind is face to face with the last enemy, human birth, and knows it not.”

Elsie: Does this mean Mrs. Eddy’s writings are all directed toward the overcoming of this “last enemy, human birth,” but that her teaching had to be hidden?

CORPOREAL SENSE OF CREATION “CAST OUT”

Abraham: Yes. We know in St. John’s vision of the Apocalypse the great dragon (animal magnetism) was cast out of heaven, as Revelation 12:9 tells us:

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.

Now, Elsie, if you will read p. 56:11 of our present Science and Health, you will notice that what is “cast out” is “the corporeal sense of creation.” In other words, Jesus prophesied to St. John that human birth, “the last enemy” alias “the great red dragon ... called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world,” was to be “cast out.” Here “the corporeal sense of creation” or HUMAN BIRTH IS EQUATED WITH THE “GREAT RED DRAGON” AND IS CAST OUT. Could it be plainer? If Jesus was on earth today, those that feel that human birth is a blessed event, would cry out anew, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

“This Dragon stands for the sum total of human belief, called Animal Magnetism,—belief that organic animal life produces sin, sickness, and death. [This Dragon is mortal mind and ‘one theory about this mortal mind is that its sensations can reproduce man, can form blood, flesh, and bones”‘ (1910 ed. p.372:6)].

“The Revelator lifts the veil from this embodiment of all evil, and beholds its character. He sees a great red Dragon at the couch of the ideal deliverer of this present age, causing her sore travail. The Revelator sees that old Serpent whose name is Devil, or Evil, holding untiring watch, that he may bite the heel of Truth and devour the offspring of the spiritual Woman, who is prolific in health, holiness, and immortality” (S&H 16th to 50th ed., p. 515)

Also, Elsie, if you will turn to page 265:21 (1910 ed.) you will notice it says: “the error is unreal and obsolete.” Then to find out what “the error” is, we look at the marginal heading which reads: “Mortal birth and death.” It is mortal birth and death that is unreal and obsolete. To repeat, “the corporeal sense of creation” is “unreal and obsolete,” and is equated with “the great dragon,” which must be “cast out.”

Understanding and comfort will come to the seeker after Truth by turning to page 68:30 (ibid.) which begins:

Proportionately as human generation ceases, the unbroken links of eternal, harmonious being will be spiritually discerned.

Actually, once we take seriously the fundamental platform in Science—that God makes and governs man, that man is therefore not a product of the union of the sexes—there is no longer a mystery concerning what Mrs. Eddy hid. We then see logical evidence of it on every page, especially as our grasp of the system grows stronger and we accept her teaching that we are divine Principle, Mind, which can only create spiritually, never materially.

Bill: As we have already discussed, Revelation 10:7, speaks of “the mystery [that] should be finished” when the seventh angel sounded. The mystery was finished when Mrs. Eddy completed her mission.

JESUS’ STATEMENTS ON BIRTH AND MARRIAGE

Florence: In our last session we were reminded that Mrs. Eddy told a class it was Jesus’ teaching on this very point of human birth that made the high priests determine: “it is expedient for us that one man should die... [so] that the whole nation perish not” (John 11:50)

Elsie: Could someone give a few references to indicate what Jesus had been teaching that caused the high priests to fear him?

Danny: Matthew 22:30 records him saying: “In the resurrection [in the awakening from the Adam dream] they neither marry, nor are given in marriage...”

Matthew 19:14: Jesus, speaking of little children (who have no knowledge of sex), said: “of such is the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 23:9: “Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.”

Moving on to Mark 12:25: Jesus said: “For when they shall rise from the dead [from the Adam-dream of life in matter] they neither marry nor are given in marriage.”

Mark 13:17: “Woe to them that are with child, and to them that give suck…” See also Mark 10:14, 15.

Then we come to Luke 17:27: “They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark and the flood came, and destroyed them all,”

Luke 20:34, 35: “...they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain…the resurrection from the dead [from the belief of life and sensation in matter] neither marry nor are given in marriage.”

Luke 23:29: “Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bare....”

Lastly, in John, 8:43-45: Jesus speaks plainly about human birth. He tells them they can’t understand him because:

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning [believing there is life and sensation in matter is the murderer]....then he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar and the father of it. And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.

Moderator: Thank you, Danny. Would anyone like to add?

Grace: Among notes preserved of Mrs. Eddy’s teaching, the following may be found:

In a booklet entitled “Fragment of a Lost Gospel,” published by Oxford University Press, giving account of sayings of Jesus that are regarded as authentic by scholars, we find the following: “When Salome asked when those things about which she questioned should be made known, the Lord said, ‘When ye trample upon the garment of shame, when the two become one and the male with the female, neither male nor female.”‘ The meaning being that Christ’s kingdom on earth would not manifest itself until man had returned to the state of innocence in which sexual ideas and relations had no place. “When Salome asked how long death would prevail, the Lord said, ‘So long as ye women bear children, for I have come to destroy the works of the female.”‘ Logia of Jesus, Christian Science Journal, Vol. 25, “Jesus was asked, ‘How long shall the dominion of death continue?’ Jesus saith, ‘As long as (material) birth continues for I am come to destroy the works of birth.”‘ See Matt. 5:17 and S&H 69. (DCC p. 14).

Jesus said, “I am a man who has told you the truth.” In the Old Testament there are many statements that Jesus must have brought to his listeners’ attention. For instance, Jeremiah (20:14, 15) cursed the day of his birth. Job 3:1-3: “Job...cursed his day... nd said, Let the day perish wherein I was born….” In Job 14:1: he reiterates: “Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble.”

MRS. EDDY’S SIMILAR STATEMENTS

Moderator: In our discussion of her Chapter 1, Natural Science,(see p. 156, Mary Baker Eddy: God’s Great Scientist, Vol. I) we reviewed the teaching that Jesus was put to death because of his outspoken and uncompromising stand on human procreation. Very few are ready for this teaching even today. Had Mrs. Eddy not hidden her teaching on this subject her mission would have been aborted.

Now let’s tie this in with what Mrs. Eddy has written in Chapter I of the first edition. What does she emphasize there?

Anna: What seems to stand out are her plainly-worded statements, such as:

“We are Spirit, and Spirit is God.”

“We are Soul,” and “to admit oneself Soul sets us free.”

“We shall be found Love, Life, and Truth when we understand them.”

Remember this is MRS. EDDY’S teaching. There are dozens of such forthright, open, profound and unmistakable statements of Truth in the first and other early editions (which are also in the final edition but in veiled form). She makes it clear that “Jesus regarded himself Principle,” and unless we understand that we are Principle, we have nothing to work with or from. “All consciousness is Mind,” Principle.

On page 10:25 of the first edition she says: “Opinions and beliefs are the foundation of all error.”

Elsie: Just what is the error?

Anna: It is the false belief that makes us think we are man, “the reflex shadow of God,” when the truth is, “we are Spirit, and Spirit is God,” as clearly stated in the first edition.

She tells us the mistake of thinking we are man instead of knowing we are Spirit and that Spirit is God, adversely affects the harmony of man far more than the Ptolemaic blunder relating to the sun and earth, in that it “reverses the order of Science, and assigns to matter the power and prerogative of Spirit, so that man becomes the most absolutely weak and inharmonious creature in the universe.” As has been repeatedly emphasized, this blunder robs us of knowing that we “have sovereign power to think and act rightly” (Pul. 3:7); and of knowing that we are always “alone with [our] own being and with the reality of things” (‘01. 20:8).

Bill: The belief that man is born of a woman is strongest in the most material natures. The physical body is an unfoldment of mortal mind out into expression. Mortals say: “I have gotten a man from the Lord.” But this “was a falsehood from the beginning; for this man was a foul murderer, and Truth and Love never produced ... the Adam and his progeny; that which is not God, or His idea, is not only evil and mortal, but unreal, yea, illusion” (first ed. p. 258). What Mrs. Eddy had to hide were those open forthright statements that we are God. The mortal, misinterpreting these, assumes he is God, and that he, through a process of sexual union, can create other mortals after his own kind. Her denunciation of “marriage synonymous with legalized lust” and of corporeal creation as that which is “cast out” of heaven, alias the great red dragon—all one and the same error—caused her to be crucified, as it did Jesus when he put forth this same truth.

Elsie: Now I am beginning to see! Could it be stated in one simple sentence?

Bill: Yes. She hid the truth that human birth is the murderer—that “there is nothing jubilant attached to the birth of a mortal that suffers and pays the penalty of his parents’ misconception of man and God’s creation” as she explained in her Christmas message to the Christian Science Board of Directors. In this message she added: “But there is joy unutterable in knowing that Christ [our true selfhood] had no birth, no death, and that we may find in Christ, in the true sense of being, life apart from birth, sorrow, sin and death. O may your eyes not be holden, but may you discern spiritually what is our Redeemer” (DCC p. 128).

Notice how the next bit of evidence links her mission with that of Jesus who said, “I am come to destroy the works of birth.” (As we read this account of Mrs. Eddy’s teaching, remember, she said her mission was “to complete the works of Christ Jesus.”) The following incident was recorded by Lydia Hall who served in Mrs. Eddy’s home:

Mrs. Eddy received a letter at Pleasant View from Christian Scientists in Concord asking her to congratulate them over the birth of a Christian Science baby. She read it aloud; then with apparent indignation uttered: “A Christian Science baby! A crime! just as much a crime as a murder would be! She paused...then raised her hand and shaking her finger declared with great emphasis: “No loyal Christian Scientist will ever marry” (DCC p. 255-256).

Moses: She really laid it on!

THE GENIUS OF A DIVINE REVELATOR

We can see why she had to hide the pivotal point of her teaching from the worldly material thought that would again crucify this truth. The ability to hide the mystery of Godliness until it becomes self-revelatory to a receptive consciousness, is part of the genius of a divine revelator. Nevertheless, the clergy saw she was proving her teaching, and that she meant business—that it was not just empty rhetoric.

Francy: In a certain way the shock to the clergy reminds me of the incorrigible boy whose parents, after sending him to several Protestant schools with no improvement, finally sent him to a Catholic school. Later, visiting, they were told the boy was doing excellent work, Surprised, they asked, “Why?” The faculty, not able to give an answer, called the boy in. Asked about the good grades, he pointed to a large crucifix and said, “These people mean business.”

The clergy, the medical, the press, and their sympathizers saw that Mrs. Eddy meant business; hence the terrible persecution she encountered and the inescapable necessity to hide this teaching or it would be lost—ridiculed out of existence. “The disciples and prophets thrust disputed points on minds unprepared for them. This cost them their lives, and the world’s temporary esteem” (Mis. 84:7).

WHO OR WHAT THE CREATOR IS

Elsie: Since Jesus called the belief that man is a creator, “the murderer,” what or who then is the creator?

Moses: Let me ask you a few questions, Elsie: Who is the only “I” or “Us”?

Elsie: In the first edition, p. 65:28, Mrs. Eddy wrote: “The Science of being reveals ..this ‘I’ not body, nor in body, but Soul outside of matter... pirit and not person, and through this reckoning, man gains eternal identity.” On the same page, line 15, she states, “When we are Spirit we shall have gained the high import of this Scripture, ‘I and my Father are one.”‘

Moses: Wouldn’t it logically follow, if “we are Spirit, and Spirit is God,” that we would be the only “I” or “Us” since there is only the one, and “all consciousness is Mind”? Naturally we are now speaking in the realm of the real, the spiritual realm, not the realm of illusions that we seem engulfed in.

Elsie: Yes, that would follow in divine logic.

Moses: Then, who or what is it that in Genesis 1:26, says: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”?

Elsie: It would have to be the “Us,” the “Love, Life, and Truth,” which she says we will be when we understand them— it would have to be Spirit, Soul, divine Principle, which she has also told us we are.

CREATION WHOLY MENTAL AND SPIRITUAL

Moses: Then, if the “Us,” or Life, Truth and Love, is the creator, what would the nature of its creation be?

Elsie: It would be a wholly mental, a divinely mental and spiritual creation, since like produces like.

Moses: If this were understood spiritually and acted upon, what would happen to the human birth process resulting from a union of the sexes? and for that matter to the entire “marriage synonymous with legalized lust [syndrome]”? (My. 5:4). Elsie: I suppose, as Mrs. Eddy said, “the whole ghastly farce would cease.”

Moses: Now do you see why she had to hide it? Was the world ready for this high-caliber spiritual thinking?

Elsie: By no means.

Moses: Few are ready for it even now although signs of progress and of spiritualization are definitely seen. The suffering the world is today undergoing will continue to compel progress, and this progress will finally take off all human shackles and destroy every error.

Mrs. Eddy wrote, there would be no more feeling in the body than in “the trunk of a tree which you gash, or the electric wire which you stretch, were it not for mortal mind.” She taught that “matter has no sensation,” but as Abraham quoted, “one theory about this mortal mind is, that its sensations can reproduce man, can form blood, flesh, and bones” (1910 ed. 372:6). What would the humanly-logical men of the cloth, doctors, and other materially “intelligent” folks deduce from these statements?

They saw the inevitable consequence of such teaching, and as was said with the First Coming of the Christ, so it was now said concerning the Second: This woman performs many miracles. If we don’t stop her, all people will soon believe her, and there will be no more fleshly offspring; then what will happen to our professions, our pocketbooks? She must be stopped!

The same elements in society that considered Jesus a criminal for “spiritualizing materialistic beliefs” (ibid. 316:25) persisted forty long years in their persecution of her whom God had appointed to complete the work of Christ Jesus—of her whose writing constituted the Second Coming of the Christ. But no weapon formed against her prospered. In spite of harassment and the fixedness of human illusions—she gloriously fulfilled her mission, leaving us the greatest, the richest, of all inheritances through the understanding of omnipresent Love.

Elsie: Are you saying that she was able to complete her mission because she hid this truth that the only creation is the spiritual creation?

Moses: Yes, it takes a lot of study to see what is really in her writings. For example, she doesn’t say openly what sin is. But when Laura Sargent asked her, “Mother, what do you mean by sin, sin, sin?” She answered, “I mean the connubial relation” (early Collectanea).

God made them male and female from the beginning, but His creation was not physical. He made qualities and formations of character, which shall ever remain thus as the reflection of God [divine Love]....

Is the connubial relation sin? Yes. Can you be a Christian Scientist and maintain it now, for honesty is the Christian Scientist’s first law? Can you uphold the old marriage relation, which is only legalized lust, and be a Christian Scientist?

Failure to hold on to the Truth means fear of letting go of the error. Unwillingness to give up sin implies fear of not getting something satisfactory in place of it. (EOF p. 79-80).

And in the final edition she writes: “False and self-assertive theories have given sinners the notion that they can create what God cannot,—namely, sinful mortals....” (1910 ed. 204:23).

MRS. EDDY’S DEEP MEANING OF ANIMAL MAGNETISM

Danny: The realization of this truth can raise the dying. The following healing illustrates the point:

The care of an elderly parent involved several members of a family in sleepless nights of watching by her sickbed. One of the daughters, a Christian Science practitioner, offered to relieve the others so they could get some sleep. Alone with the unconscious form on the bed, she stood over it, and shaking her finger, said firmly, “You think you are a creator. You think you made all of us. You are nothing! Absolutely nothing!” With that the woman awoke and she was healed.

Moderator: Thank you, Danny. It took courage on the part of that daughter to utter truth, and bring out the fact that Spirit dominates all matter. As we rise spiritually we lose all sense of an “I” in matter and we gain our true selfhood in Spirit. This realization raised the woman from her deathbed and restored health. Divine health is never dependent upon body but upon Truth, Principle, where it is forever the same.

When Mrs. Eddy was pressed concerning what she meant by the term, “animal magnetism,” her generic term for error, she said it was “sin,” indicating the same meaning of sin she had given Laura Sargent.

Speaking of “the Pandora box, from which all ills have gone forth, especially despair,” Mrs. Eddy writes:

Matter, which takes divine power into its own hands and claims to be a creator, is a fiction, in which paganism and lust are so sanctioned by society that mankind has caught their moral contagion. (1910 ed. 170:30).

Moses: It is mortal birth that pulls the wool over our eyes, causing the deep sleep which fell upon Adam, in which cause and effect are mere illusions. It is the false belief in mortal birth that seems to rob us of our true identity as Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love, until, through Science, we awaken out of false beliefs and illusions.

Mrs. Eddy taught those in her home: “Every sexual emotion is a conspiracy against Science,” and “the treatment, Love is All, will make the person treated mentally strong and confident, and without fear. Love is All, will destroy lust or sex desires, as sex is lack of mental confidence” (DCC pp. 79 and 285).

“Having a baby,” she said, “is no more real than having a tumor.” “God, the Mind of man” (1910 ed. 470:17; 319:20) is the only creator, and does all the creating that is done. It is general mortal thought that first said man came from the dust of the ground, Adam; then from a rib, Eve; and now from “a circumscribed and nonintelligent egg” (ibid. 550:1). But Science has come to teach us the present isness of Life. “Man is, not shall be perfect and eternal” (ibid. 428:23). And the time is at hand to accept “the spiritual origin of man which ushered Jesus into human presence” (ibid. 325:27

We can accept the truth about ourselves now. Note her teaching:

A lie is never true. This departure from Truth came with the words sex, sexuality, sensuousness, matter; and these are the objective state of what is called mind separated from God, the one Mind. (EOF p. 45). [The solution is to see that man never was separated, never did fall away from oneness with God. However, one born of the flesh cannot avoid the struggle that insues in the laying down of the mortal concept.

Mother explained the difference between a material sense of love and a spiritual sense. A material sense of love dishonors the one it professes to love through lust, as in marriage the man dishonors the woman he claims to love by taking away her virginity, thereby exposing the falsity of such a sense by showing it is not love, but lust, i.e. hate....his is the Lamb...slain from the foundation of a material sense of sexuality. (DCC p. 101).

Bill: The root evil is respect for ecclesiastical authority, for tradition; the crowd is ignorant, they follow the herd instinct; they won’t think for themselves, but think what the “authorities” tell them to think. Until instructed in Science we are all victims of the “crowd” mentality.

During the terrible ordeal of the Next Friend’s suit, which involved her son’s complicity, Mrs. Eddy said, “I am now being punished for the fruits of my first marriage” (DCC p. 32). “A Christian Science Statute” (Mis. 298) states: “These words of St. Matthew have special application to Christian Scientists, namely, ‘It is not good to marry!”‘ But if one assumes a marriage contract one is held in faithful allegiance to it. Jesus assumed no such human obligations as marriage and church, but Mrs. Eddy contracted both so she was forced to find the scientific solution for them. This, of necessity, made her the bride.

THE REAL MAN—WOMAN ONENESS

Abraham: I think we all understand what has just been said was in no way meant to disparage the wonderful relationship that can exist between a man and a woman; it can be the nearest thing to heaven known on earth. We must remember that in Principle, in the great forever, man and woman are one. They were one in the beginning; the delusion that manhood is separated from womanhood originated with the Adam-dream. Regarding this Mrs. Eddy fully assented to the proposition that:

The tendency of the desire for the sweet companionship of the opposite sex is divinely natural. Remember primarily the individual was equal and wholly satisfied. He was God’s image and reflection, reflection of Father-Mother. Learn not to condemn this longing, because it is about the only thing in a human being that seen for what it is indicates his divine entity. In the beginning man and woman were one, and mortal mind made the separation. Therefore the constant longing for completion. We show our love for God by loving His reflection. Divine Love will eventually cause each one of us to turn and find in Him [in our own Mind that is Love] what we have vainly looked for in each other....

[Because of the persecution her teaching had met with she counseled wisdom and patience:]

“The wise man saith, ‘When I was a child I thought as a child, etc.’” The wisdom of this and of every period is temperance, to wait on the divine energy’s development of moral strength and human possibilities. To push a fact to its ultimate sometimes so injures the predicate as to lose instead of to gain time in the unfolding of God’s plan. The absolute in divine Science is an infinite fact approachable in time by degrees; its ultimate is eternity, its footsteps are time. Marriage and offspring are mortal conditions which take their origin in the human, and not in the divine Mind. It is a great and solemn question how far to press the divine facts of being, and their manifestation, into present human experience and practice. (EOF p. 80).

Moderator: Thank you, Abraham. Bessie, do you wish to add something?

Bessie: A dear couple of my acquaintance recently celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary. The wife, due to the belief of aging, is no longer able to speak, but her husband says they no longer need words to convey their constancy and their undying love for each other. In the bond that cements them their hearts beat as one.

THE SOLUTION FOR THE HUMAN RACE

Elsie: What is the solution that Christian Science presents for the redemption of the human race?

Moses: It is the system she named Christian Science, and which she wove into the text of Science and Health. “Be wholly absorbed in the work of daily gaining more understanding of God,” Mrs. Eddy admonished her students. “Then personal ambition, envy, desire to be in this or that place cannot use you. Personal ambition has no place in a Christian’s thought or life. He is wholly occupied in the loving humble purpose to do good, to be good and to prove that good is all that can govern thought, action, condition, or being.”

Elsie: Why is the system the solution?

Moses: Because it gets personality out of the way. It gets Moses or Elsie out of the way—it gets a personal sense of self out of the way, so that we become the scientific system; we become impersonal Science; and our thought moves only in the three great categories of being. In a way it could be likened to studying mathematics; there we also get self out of the way and work only out from the principle; we do not interject our personality into the principle of mathematics. In the Science of being, working out from Principle is the only thing that matters. But remember the Principle is Love which expresses itself in loving relationships with one’s fellowman; if this does not result, we are somehow missing the main point of the whole study of our textbook.

REVIEW OF THE THREE GREAT CATEGORIES

Elsie: In No and Yes (p. 24:8) Mrs. Eddy states: “My system of metaphysics rests on God as One and All, and denies the actual existence of matter and evil.” She also says “the song of Christian Science is ‘Work—work—work—watch and pray”‘ (‘00:2:7). Why does she stress work? Also, before we start Chapter 11, Imposition and Demonstration, could we have a brief review of the three great overall categories that we know constitute this system?

Moses: Regarding “work”: religion doesn’t require work; it leans on sentiment, emotion, ritual observances. But a Science, with its system, is different. It concerns itself with education, study, and learning. Remember, Mrs. Eddy has about 120 references to this fact that Christian Science is something that must be learned. Because of the purity of her thought, she was used by God, infinite good, as its recording angel. She wrote down what God (her true and real divine Mind) dictated concerning those three all-revealing categories through which the infinite unknown, namely divine Love (God), AS A WHOLE, could be reduced to simplicity. Even a child can now learn these categories, and so become one with God, infinite good.

The system of fundamental categories gives us the tools we need for all work in Christian Science.

Moses: The first great