Mary Baker Eddy

God’s Great Scientist

Volume II

by

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

Mary Baker Eddy, Leader Forever (44 page pamphlet) FREE

Mary Baker Eddy, Leader Forever (112 page booklet) FREE

Second Edition

Copyright 1996 by Helen M. Wright

26803 Edgewater Blvd. NW • Poulsbo, WA 98370

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN 1-886505-05-5

“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

of

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 category consists of the seven—fold nature of God which the first edition unequivocally states we are, though it remained for later editions to state this category in its present exact form as: Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love.

The second category is the divine infinite calculus, in which the seven—fold nature of God operates as the four orders of Word, Christ, Christianity, and Science.

The third category consists of the planes, levels, or dimensions of Science, namely, (1) Science itself, (2) divine Science, (3) absolute Christian Science, and (4) Christian Science.

Elsie: How do we start?

Moses: We start with the first great category, the seven synonymous terms for God. In the final edition Mrs. Eddy has approximately 800 references to Mind, 600 to Spirit, 161 to Soul, 300 to Principle, 370 to Life, over 700 to Truth, and 366 to Love.

Careful study of the seven deific synonyms reveals their distinct character through the ideas associated with them. We ponder each of these references, not so much to find out and become familiar with our true identity, but rather to understand God, the Principle of being. Of course, as we study we become familiar with our true identity. Then as that understanding becomes concrete, tangible, real, to us, it becomes subjective and we don’t hesitate to acknowledge: I am Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love.

Rookie: I can see that a higher motive is involved if we search the textbook because of the love of divine Truth, than if we do the study only to find out our true identity. As she told the New York church, we must “rise above the oft repeated inquiry, What am I? to the scientific response: I am able to impart truth, health, and happiness...”

Moderator: That’s correct, Rookie.

THE OPERATIONS OF BIRTH OUT OF MATTER

Who can add a little to the second overall category?

Tommy: The second category is learning how these 7 elements which constitute our divinity, our true identity, operate in a fourfold calculus of Word, (seeking); Christ (finding); Christianity (using); and Science (being). The Word reveals our God-being to us. The Christ translates it. Christianity demonstrates it. And Science interprets it. Here, again, the right motive for study is the love of Truth, of God, infinite good—the love of reality. To arrive at “the atmosphere of God,” which permeates the first edition, our motive must be completely unselfed.

The whole purpose of the system is this intermediary purpose to give birth to the understanding of God. This birth out of matter into Spirit is a daily and hourly growth. “It is forever getting nearer Love that is Love; universal divine presence and power” (DCC. p. 72). If the system doesn’t move us ever closer to the Love—Principle that expresses itself in love for one’s fellowman, we are on a divergent path.

In working with the system Mrs. Eddy “denominated Christian Science” we must watch that personal sense does not pervert it or subvert it into a false intellectual exercise. “Conscious worth satisfies the hungry heart, and nothing else can” (‘02. 17:24). But if personal sense is trying to arrive at “conscious worth” it will never arrive.

Moderator: Yes, we must not let the system become restrictive rather than expansive, and so lead us off the real path of love for God and man.

Abraham: Apropos of that Mrs. Eddy admonished:

The letter alone without a due proportion of the spirit of Christian Science, almost inhumanizes a mortal; it chastises his material mode of love, of feeling, or being either kind or true, and if he has not gained the spiritual sense of those, there is nothing left to him but the knowledge of a false sense of goodness which he must either loathe and lose the false sense of goodness, or else, having it, be consciously false to himself, and of necessity false to others. (EOF. p. 57).

A great sacrifice of materiality has to precede this advanced spiritual understanding. We have to give all our love to Principle without first asking: What am I going to get in return for it?

UNDERSTANDING LEVELS OBVIATES
“CONTRADICTIONS”

Moderator: Thank you, Abraham. Who would like to review briefly what the third great overall category is concerned with? We have already devoted considerable time to this category in Vol. I of Mary Baker Eddy: God’s Great Scientist.

Margie: The third great category consists of the four levels on which these seven synonyms, which constitute our being, operate, namely, the level of Science itself, divine Science, absolute Christian Science, and Christian Science. A student who understands the levels on which Mrs. Eddy wrote finds no contradictory statements in her writings; he becomes aware that “the divine Science of man is woven into one web of consistency without seam or rent” because:

From the infinite One in Christian Science comes one Principle [the only “I” or Ego (1910 ed. 588:9)] and its infinite idea, and with this infinitude come spiritual rules, laws, and their demonstration (ibid. 112:16). Man has perpetual individuality; and God’s laws, and their intelligent and harmonious action, constitute his individuality in the Science of Soul. (No. 11:5).

The outcome of a spiritual understanding of the scientific system in our textbook is the establishment of “the supremacy of Spirit which obliterates the human sense of the divine, takes away all sense of matter, and reveals the final fact that the idea, Christ, is not a materialized or finite man or woman, but is the infinite concept of infinite Mind” (EOF p. 48).

Moderator: Thank you for that review of the divine system with which we must identify ourselves—but with which, in reality, we are already at one.

Let’s now take up Chapter 11, Imposition and Demonstration.

CHAPTER II:

IMPOSITION AND DEMONSTRATION

PART I

Imposition

IMPOSITION AND DEMONSTRATION:
DEEPLY SPIRITUAL

Moderator: Imposition and Demonstration is a deeply spiritual chapter. Has anyone noticed how many times this chapter uses the term “Science” which Mrs. Eddy says “is the mind of God” (‘01. 22:4)?

Margie: It once occurred to me that in the first edition, where we encounter the highest statements Mrs. Eddy ever made directly, her whole emphasis is on Science, i.e., on the Science itself level where the infinite One, the one Principle, includes its idea. In the final, the 1910, edition which is the broadest—designed to meet the need of humanity—Mrs. Eddy reduced this Science to the Christian Science level which shows how ideas dissolve illusions, and error is overcome by an understanding of Truth

With this in mind, I made a rough count of her use of “Science” and “scientific” in the entire first edition. As I recall, it was nearly 800 times; and in this chapter, Imposition and Demonstration, she uses these terms about 186 times.

Moderator: The great overtone of the first part, Imposition, is that there is but one Spirit; there are not many “spirits,” persons. Nothing is real but God and God’s expression. She is here contrasting the onliness of Spirit with the dualism of imposition, her name for spiritualism (or minds many) in this chapter.

The first part of this chapter concerns the imposition of illusions, alias mortal mind-how mortal mind tries to make us believe we are mortals, subject to sin, sickness, and death; but we cannot be made to believe a lie. This chapter instructs us how to come out of illusions, human opinions, minds many, or “spirits”—how to rid ourselves of the lie that we are mortal, the lie Jesus called “a murderer from the beginning.”

The chapter teaches we must look to Science for an understanding of our true God-being. We get the truth about the real world only as we go out from the standpoint of Spirit, instead of the standpoint of mortals (“spirits”).

The basis of all scientific deduction is that there can be but one full and complete reflection of one God. We do not have the right basic sense of Christian Science until we grasp this fundamental fact. There is not another starting point

The sense of a material universe—the product of false beliefs, false education, ancient mythology—has befogged humanity since the dawn of human consciousness. The sense of a material universe with its sin, sickness, and death, is like a mask hiding the ever-present spiritual real universe. Mrs. Eddy calls this mask animal magnetism, and shows it to be only a mistaken concept, a facade, without substance. Behind this mask is the face of God, or good only.

HOW IT WORKS

Marie: Could someone explain how it works? Does the mind always control the body, and how?

Florence: Yes. You affirm the truth over and over that you are Mind and what Mrs. Eddy’s writings tell us Mind includes; that you are Spirit and what it includes; that you are what Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, and Love are, and what they include. This affirming and reaffirming acts just as the sun and rain do on the seed buried in the ground. The sun and rain call it forth. Your affirmations call forth what is already latent in consciousness.

You readily admit that thought controls the body. The arm can’t move of itself. You have to think about something you want the arm to reach for or the arm doesn’t move. A leg doesn’t walk by itself, you have to think about making a move. It moves only in obedience to your thought. In the same way, your affirmations of truth bring you into oneness with Truth, just as affirming weariness makes that weariness. (See 1910 ed. p. 218:2.) We heal ourselves of the plagues of mortal mind through the conviction of their unreality; and this conviction comes through the constant affirming of the Truth which we know we are in reality.

The standpoint of the first edition is that in reality “we are Spirit, Soul, Principle, Love, Life, and Truth.” Therefore our starting point must be to recognize God as the only source of understanding. Since Science, true knowing, is the Mind of God, we must learn this Science, must assimilate the truth of being set forth in Mary Baker Eddy’s writings. Remember she has about 120 references in Science and Health indicating this Science must be learned in order to tap the source of all comprehension. The belief that the human intellect or a personal I can give us true understanding must be relinquished.

SCIENCE EXPOSES IMPOSITION

The Imposition part of this chapter corrects our terrible misconceptions and explains that we touch reality only as we go out from the one Mind, God. Our true being is understanding, the spiritual understanding which is Love. Understanding is Love with us, the kingdom of heaven within consciousness. The chapter shows that Love and spiritual understanding are one. We must be brought into a state of love for all mankind, for only in that state can healing be accomplished.

Grace: In Science of Man Mrs. Eddy stated categorically that “understanding is God.” In the final edition of Science and Health understanding is still God, but veiled. There on page 115 we first get a true picture of our being as God: Divine Principle, Life, Truth, Love, Soul, Spirit, Mind.

Man, the divine image, is there set forth as “God’s spiritual idea”; and “idea” is defined as an image in Mind.

This would be the first edition standpoint, where it is openly stated that we are Spirit, Soul, Principle, Love, Life, and Truth.

Then she shows how an ignorant, false, unreal sense of things is changed by the pouring in of the teachings of Science:

First, the evil beliefs, passions and appetites, depraved will, etc. gradually supplanted by the transitional qualities of humanity, honesty, affection, compassion, etc., which she names “moral.” As this translating goes on, we arrive at reality, the “Third Degree: UNDERSTANDING,” which is the same standpoint that she began with in the “Scientific translation of immortal Mind.” In the third degree mortal mind, ignorance, false beliefs, illusions have disappeared, and reality is understood

So, through laying off ignorance and unreality, we have come full circle to the standpoint of the divine synonyms.

PERSISTANCE AND PERSEVERANCE REQUIRED

Anna: I read somewhere that the chick inside the egg has to peck at its shell 10,000 times before the shell is broken. Then the little chick can look down with wonderment at the broken shell and say: “Did I come out of that?” Likewise, “mortals must peck open their shells with Christian Science [to escape the covering, the veil of illusion animal magnetism has wrapped them in], and look outward and upward” (1910 ed. 552:16).

When the infinite God-consciousness replaces the restricted mental state mortals presently seem to be in, then they too, with a stare of incredulity, can look down on their broken shell.

Abraham: But we are not Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love, until we are able to demonstrate this fact. There is a cross to be taken up: namely, the laying down of the mortal viewpoint. Experiencing the kingdom of heaven isn’t a gift from the tooth fairy.

Sally: This again gives us an idea why Mrs. Eddy gradually hid the great scientific truths she so openly stated in Science of Man where she bluntly declared: “You, my students, are God,” which she reiterates in the first edition in many ways. She tells us our true being is Spirit, understanding, which she calls God. But mortals persist in the belief that Spirit needs matter in order to express itself; that intelligence, which is God, expresses itself through the human mind; and that thinking is connected with the brain. Mortals believe life is in the body, and that the person or animal is dead when signs of life leave the body

This belief that intelligence and life are channeled through the body is what Mrs. Eddy here calls “imposition,” and which she later called “spiritualism.” She indicates we are spiritualists to the extent we believe this baseless fabrication.

Tommy: Understanding is the divinely endowed scientific consciousness already within us, within Mind or God which Mrs. Eddy instructs us “is at once the center and circumference of being” (1910 ed. 203:32). Then she says that the clearer, higher views Science gives, “inspire the Godlike man to reach the absolute center and circumference of his being” (ibid. 262:14).

Anna: We must not forget that the one infinite Mind that is Spirit can have but one infinite manifestation (or “man”), and that this infinite Mind expresses itself in a system of divine ideas—the system “she denominated Christian Science,” and which she tells us must be “learned.”

There are not minds many or “spirits” many. That is the big point of this chapter. There is one infinite good which expresses itself in one system of divine ideas.

THE SO-CALLED MIND OF BODY

Rocky: What, then, is the so-called mind of mortal man?

Moderator: Mrs. Eddy answers this question right at the beginning of the Imposition part of this chapter. She says:

P. 65:1: What we term the mind of man is belief, forming the visionary basis of matter, therefore matter embraces not the reality of man. Belief is not a manifestation of Intelligence, but of non-intelligence. To distinguish between the mind of Soul and the so-called mind of body, we must remember one is idea, and the other belief, alias the counterfeit and claimant of mind, even as error claims Truth.

Moderator: In that reference she says, “matter embraces not the reality of man,” and in an early sermon, she admonished her listeners:

The truth of the body is as essential to man’s harmony as the truth of the Soul, but the letter regarding both is not sufficient for either. The letter of Truth is useful only that thereby the student may gain the spirit thereof; the letter alone killeth, but the spirit maketh alive; we work cheerfully for what we love; eagerly we pursue the object of affection, and how certainly we accomplish that whereunto we devote our lives, and give our energies. The apathy, lack of Love and Christian vigor, comes of seeking only the letter of Truth, and stopping there because it costs so much more to gain the spirit thereof.

The price of Truth is hourly devotion, cheerful sacrifice, toil and irrepressible conflict....The Science of Christian healing, or the basis and tendency thereof, can be taught, but the Principle of this Science can never be fully understood unless we strive for the Spirit of Truth and Love....

Relying on the help of God is looking to a person instead of a Principle for our demonstration—divine Science requires more of us; do your own work is the demand of Truth. You must understand the Principle of Spirit so far as to realize the nothingness of matter and the supremacy of Spirit. (EOF p. 98).

Anna: In her chapter Natural Science we learned that all personal human opinions, conceptions, theories, are built on the mingling of opposites rather than on the one Spirit. But when we turn to Science for answers we are turning to our real and divine Mind which alone can unlock the reality of being for us, and we, then, launch out from a “boundless basis” discarding the lie that life can be in the body, the lie which results in the human belief of “gods and lords many.” Generic man is another name for the coincidence of the divine Principle and the divine idea. They are one.

Looking from God’s point of view, from the God-consciousness, she declares in the first edition:

P. 65:15: When we are Spirit we shall have gained the high import of this Scripture, “I and the Father [divine Principle] 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.

Johnny: That is a powerful, informative statement. Next she says:

P. 65:22 The question at present is whether this “I” is Principle or person, Soul or body, yea, God or man?....Where do we place the “I”; is it Spirit in matter, Soul in body, Life in the flower, or the outside Intelligence and Life that form these... ?

Mrs. Eddy defines “I,” in part, as “divine Principle, Spirit,” and says “there is but one 1, or Us” (1910 ed. 588:9).

Abraham: As Anna just read: “When we are Spirit, we shall... find ... that ‘I’ signifies Spirit and not matter.” And as explained to Elsie at the outset of today’s session, this should awaken us to the deep meaning of Genesis 1:26: “Let us make man in our image....”

Sally: It is clear, since “we are Spirit,” and “we are Soul,” that we are therefore the “Us,” that can say: “Let us make man in our image….” What a profound teaching this is!

BOUNDLESS LOVE EXPRESSES ITSELF AS MAN

Abraham: Of course we realize and demonstrate this divinity only when the structure of our consciousness becomes one with the structure of reality. Note how she explains:

P. 280:30: All formations are shadows of being and we their Soul and Substance....P. 227:24 explains:] Personality will be swallowed up in the boundless Love that shadows forth man....This is not losing man...but finding yourself more blessed as Principle than person, as God than man, as Soul than sense....[P. 273:30 further explains:] All depends on mind; matter holds no power over man to create or to destroy him.

Marie: Here we are assured “personality will be swallowed up in the boundless Love that shadows forth man.” It is Mind, Spirit, Soul as one Principle, that shadows forth man. She has consistently driven it home that we must recognize ourself as Principle and not personality. She is trying to make us realize what a blessing this realization will be when it is comprehendingly demonstrated.

Abraham: It is interesting that she says “all depends upon mind”; and mind is not capitalized here, so it means the mind we now have. But when students confused the one and only Mind, the Mind of Christ, with the illusory carnal mind, Mrs. Eddy found she had to capitalize Mind to distinguish it from a false sense of mind.

CONSCIOUSNESS IS MIND, GOD

Our next reference indicates what happens as the leaven of Truth continues its work:

P. 98:3: As mind throws off its cruder beliefs of matter and becomes more spiritualized, phenomena resulting therefrom will become more wonderful, and should be understood on the basis of Soul, throwing off its own idea of Intelligence and Life.

Danny: Science has come to lift human consciousness into eternal Truth. “Science…is the Mind of God” but “the so-called mind of body is belief and error” (108:15) which fades out as errors that hide divine consciousness are dropped. Remember, she three times in Prose Works makes the statement: “All consciousness is Mind.” We certainly know we are conscious, or have consciousness; and we also know Mind is the power that forms the image called man—that forms the spiritual universe including individual man. What besides Mind could form an image?

In this chapter she states:

The body is but the reflex shadow of immortal Soul and it is impossible to lose this, for…it is the image of God, an image in Mind.

Rookie: It is thrilling to recall that on page 29:21 she affirmed: “We shall ultimately prove this Science to individual consciousness.” So, “know thyself!” Know you are Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love. Only through this right knowing do we “possess sovereign power to think and act rightly.”

Bessie: When will this understanding come?

Grace: It comes all the time as we “gain a little each day in the right direction.” Then “when the last mortal fault is destroyed…[that] will end the battle of Truth with error” (1910 ed. 292:1). This is why Science must be learned for it is “divine Science alone [that] can compass the heights and depths of being and reveal the infinite” (ibid. 292:4).

Moderator: Would anyone like to add to that?

Rocky: The realization that the “Us”—in “Let us make man in our image”—is none other than my own right mind, was a revelation to me.

Moses: It occurs to me we might say the “Us” is the masculine and feminine consciousness as one. In this true consciousness, Mind, Spirit, Soul, could be thought of as constituting the masculine element—the knowing—while Principle, Life, Truth, and Love (which is how “Mother” is defined in the Glossary) could be thought of as constituting the feminine, the feeling element that flows out from the knowing. Of course Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love “combine as one [as the “I” or “Us”]. The divine Principle includes them all” (My. 225:29). The “Us” is our own God-being, a “divinely united spiritual consciousness [in which] there is no impediment to eternal bliss” (1910 ed. 577:9).

Abraham: As long as there is only knowing, reasoning (the masculine), without revelation, or feeling (the feminine), nothing takes form. Knowing and feeling, together, are the “Us,” the “Father-Mother God” that constitutes cause. Mrs. Eddy tells us: “I won my way to absolute conclusions through divine revelation [the feminine element], reason [the masculine] and demonstration [the oneness]” (1910 ed. 109:20). “You must feel and know that God alone governs man” (Rud. 10:5),

Florence: Even in the human it seems that action and form take place whenever we feel strongly about something. Mrs. Eddy stressed that to heal scientifically and quickly we must feel Love: “You must feel Love,” she said, “this makes healing no longer just power, but grace.”

Margie: A Christian Science practitioner recently asked if I had ever thought of Mrs. Eddy’s work, Unity of Good, as the marriage of manhood and womanhood? She pointed out that the first seven chapters are about manhood, from the point of view of Mind: namely, that God knows no evil; ending with the chapter called “The Ego.”

The next seven chapters are Womanhood beginning with the chapter, Soul. The final chapter, called, Summary, is the wedding: “All that is, God created….”The last paragraph shows the indivisible oneness of the divine manhood and womanhood, which cannot “escape from identification with what dwelleth in the eternal Mind.”

Moderator: Thank you, Margie. That should make an interesting study project. Are there any questions?

WE ARE “LOVE, LIFE, AND TRUTH” NOW

Kathleen: Does Mrs. Eddy actually say we are Life, Truth, and Love?

Moderator: Yes, “Love, Life, and Truth.” In an earlier session it was brought out that every edition from the 1st to the 50th carried the statement in slightly varying forms: “We shall be found Love, Life, and Truth because we understand them.” (That statement occurs in the Imposition part of this chapter, p. 77:17.) Naturally we couldn’t be found Love, Life, and Truth unless, in reality, we already were this triune Principle.

Rookie: Since in reality we already are “Love, Life, and Truth,” this would explain why cause and effect are one.

Moderator: Yes, in our present textbook, it states “Principle and its idea is one.” We never see Principle. We see Principle’s idea, or manifestation—the manifestation of the only “I” or “Us.”

Elsie, I see you have a question.

“MAN IS NEVER GOD”

Elsie: I know Mrs. Eddy never says we are man, except when speaking in very relative terms; but when did she first make the statement, “Man is never God”? It seems an important question because most readers of this statement immediately think of themselves as “man,” and then think it sacrilegious to accept Mrs. Eddy’s statements that “we are Spirit,” “we are Soul,” “we are Principle, etc.”

Moderator: That statement was first made in the 16th edition in this same chapter, Imposition and Demonstration. It appears on page 70:7 of the final edition of the textbook in the chapter Christian Science versus Spiritualism, where she makes it clear that spiritual man is made in God’s image and likeness, reflecting God.

Elsie: Why did she, at that point say: “Man is never God?”

Bill: Because she wants it to be clear that while Principle and its idea is one, Principle is not the same as what Principle is aware of; Mind is not the same as what Mind is aware of. Man, or manifestation, is not God but is God’s reflection, expression, or what God is aware of. For instance, you might be aware of your house, your car, etc., but that would not make you your house or your car.

Moses: When considering the mountain-top statements found in the first edition it is important to remember Mrs. Eddy’s was a descending mission, and that this first edition corresponds to the “little book” in the hand of the “mighty angel [that came] DOWN from heaven” (Rev. 10:1). Mrs. Eddy’s statements. such as: “We are Spirit... We are Soul;...finding yourself more blessed as Principle than person, as God than man....We shall be Love, Life and Truth when we understand them;...You, my students, are Soul and not body, God and not man,” are all descending statements.

These revolutionary statements of divine subjectivity in the early editions were natural to Mrs. Eddy, with no distortion, and they remain as evidence of what is to be attained. As before noted, they do not represent something she was reaching for, but rather the Science she had found and accepted as the truth of being, and which she was now trying to teach humanity.

However, it is obvious from the fact that she did not retain these radical statements in her later editions, that she realized a different modus operandi was needed by her followers in order for them to attain the demonstration of divine subjectivity so natural to her. She saw that “the human self must be evangelized “ (1910 ed. 254:19); that a long warfare with the world, the flesh and the devil had to be waged by “the weary pilgrim, journeying ‘uphill all the way”‘ (ibid. 574:4).

In our present edition, immediately preceding her statement: “I hope, dear reader, I am leading you into the understanding of your divine rights....” (253:9), she contrasts the testimony of material sense with the testimony of Soul. First the impersonal “I” of material sense is voiced and then the impersonal “I” of Soul, in which God is subjective “I” and man objective “he.” This is showing the same thing she brings out in the descending message of the early editions, namely, that we are Soul, and “man” is a term denoting the image and likeness, the reflection of Soul, of our God-being.

But she also says, “My students are at the beginning of their demonstration; they have a long warfare with error in themselves and in others to finish, and they must at this stage use the sword of Spirit” (Mis. 215:23) in order to discern between the real and the illusion.

Moderator: Thank you, Moses.

ONLY ONE WORLD

What other themes are stressed in this chapter? What does she repeatedly emphasize?

Tommy: For one thing, she thoroughly wipes out the prevalent belief that God, Spirit, communicates with man through the medium of matter, through the medium of corporeality, the opposite of Spirit Imposition, her term for spiritualism, is just another word for “gross materialism” or the belief that there is life, substance, and intelligence in matter. When, through spiritual education, we are advanced to spiritual existence and the understanding of our God-being, we cannot return to commune with matter any more than an oak can return to an acorn.

Mrs. Eddy then sets forth this intriguing proposition:

P. 76:13: Did you understand there is no other world, you would be reaching sooner that which is real of Life, where substance is Soul and not matter, and realizing it thus all would be harmonious and eternal.

Moderator: In the reference just quoted she is stating that the world we now have is the only world there is. There are not two worlds—one spiritual and another material. There is the true spiritual world, and the lie about it, the lie of the fabled serpent who audaciously pushes that claim of a material world, and of life, substance, intelligence in a matter body. (See Un. 54:27.)

To artist James Gilman, Mrs. Eddy said, “Oh, if others could only see what I see, how they would work and strive to express nothing but the spirit of Truth” (Recollections of Mary Baker Eddy, p. 88).

Mrs. Eddy saw the real spiritual realm in the same way that the little mathematical prodigy, Vito Mangiamele, saw the mathematical realm and could almost instantly give the cube root of 3,796,416; and little 6-year old Benjamin Blyth could instantly calculate the number of seconds he had lived (as detailed in Vol. I of this series, p. 218).

Mrs. Eddy tells us there is a point to be determined: “Shall we allow Science to explain all action and phenomena, or leave these to speculative belief [to the satanic logic of the serpent with which (S&H 56:12 1910 ed.) equates human birth]? (early Collectanea by G.C.C.).

Sooner or later we will all discover that infinite space, the universe of Spirit, the universe we now have is peopled with Mind’s ideas with countless spiritual beings—and its government is divine Science. (See 1910 ed. 264:32 and 503:15.)

Sally: We could say, then, that infinite space is not filled with flesh and blood personalities. On this spiritually vast subject, Mrs. Eddy gave Martha Wilcox an important lesson. In an Association Address Mrs. Wilcox related the following instruction given to her by Mrs. Eddy on her first day of work in the home:

Sometimes a sense of personality arises before your thought and leads you to believe that a personality is something outside and separate from your thought, that can harm you. She showed me that the real danger was never this threatened attack from outside my thought where the personality seemed to be, but that the real danger was always within my thought. She made it clear that my sense of personality was mental—a mental image formed in my so-called mortal mind, and was never external or separate from my mind. This supposititious mortal mind outlines itself as a belief of a material personality, with form and conditions and laws and circumstances—in fact, with all of the phenomena that are embraced in what is called material life and personality. And then she showed me that not one solitary fact in this whole fabric of supposititious evil was true. She showed me that I must detect that all this mental phenomenon was only aggressive mental suggestion coming to me for me to adopt it as my own thought.

She showed me that, because mental practice is mental, the only place that I could meet it was within what seemed to be my own mentality, and the only way that I could meet it was to give up the belief in a power and presence other than God, or Truth. She showed me that this seeming within enemy could never harm me, if I were awake to the Truth and active in the Truth....

Moderator: Thank you, Sally. You have that Address; does Mrs. Wilcox tell anything more about that first morning in Mrs. Eddy’s home?

Sally: Yes, she says the talk on personalities was most helpful since there were never less than seventeen and sometimes as many as twenty-five personalities in the household. Mrs. Wilcox further related:

After this talk on mental malpractice, Mrs. Eddy opened her Bible and read to me from Luke 16: 10, 11, 12. She, no doubt, realized that at my stage of growth, I thought of creation—that is, all things—as separated into two groups, one group spiritual and the other group material, and that somehow I must get rid of the group I called material. But during this lesson I caught my first glimpse of the fact that all right, useful things—which I had been calling ‘the unrighteous mammon’—were mental and represented spiritual ideas. She showed me that unless I were faithful and orderly with the objects of sense that made up my present mode of consciousness, there could never be revealed to me the ‘true riches’, or the progressively higher revealments of substance and things.

The two lessons that I received that first morning were fundamentally great. First, I was to handle mental malpractice within my own mentality. Second, the ‘objects of sense’ when correctly understood, are really ‘ideas of Soul.’ There are not two groups of creation—but just one.

Francy: If we could grasp the fact that no discord is outside of what comes to us as our own thinking, our own consciousness, we’d have it made. Through spiritual education we will all become aware that we do have “sovereign power” because the Christian Scientist is always alone with his own being and with the reality of things.

Moderator: Making it clear that the sensual can never be the medium of the spiritual, or the finite the medium of the infinite, Mrs. Eddy wrote:

When we become Spirit, we shall be infinite and One, for there is no room for more than one, if that One is infinite. (2nd ed. p. 7).

Bill: We “become Spirit” only as our consciousness is the Holy City, as it becomes impersonal Science, constituted of the three great categories of divine being. Under the marginal heading, “Revelation’s pure zenith,” Mrs. Eddy states: “This heavenly city,...this infinite All....reached St. John’s vision while yet he tabernacled with mortals.” In Revelation 21:22 St. John wrote: “And I saw notemple therein: for the Lord God Almighty [the bride, or Word] and the Lamb are the temple of it” (1910 ed. 576:3).

Danny: Notice here that “the Lord God Almighty” is equated with the bride. The Lamb is the Jesus-mentality that weds itself to the Word, the bride. (See My. 125:26.) This means that in order to become “bride” we must wed ourselves to the Word, to Science. “The Lamb’s wife [“bride,” alias “the Lord God Almighty”] presents the unity of male and female as no longer two wedded individuals, but as two individual natures in one; and this compounded spiritual individuality reflects God as Father-Mother (1910 ed. 577:4).

Abraham: The “bride” is “purity and innocence, conceiving man in the idea of God.” We wed ourselves to the Word, the bride, as we assimilate the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, which include the teachings of Christ Jesus, which in turn include the spiritual teachings of the Old Testament.

MATERIAL SHACKLES FALL AWAY

Tommy: The chapter Imposition and Demonstration unmistakably sets forth that, in reality, there is nothing separating us from all good, since as Mind and Spirit we are infinite good in operation. As Mind, we are a state of revelation.

Bessie: What does being “a state of revelation” mean?

Tommy: Revelation in Science means the immediate consciousness of the real, in which Truth does not mix with error. In this real state, Truth is found in Love, in its divine Principle; and creation is a continual unfolding of what divine Principle, Love, infolds. Spiritual creation is the outgrowth, the emanation, of Love’s infinite selfcontainment and immortal wisdom. (See 1910 ed. 519:4.) In this creation the illusion of matter as substance, per se, is precluded:

P. 71:28: That Spirit and matter amalgamate is the error progress and Science will destroy.

Moderator: When false beliefs are conquered by Truth, by the Science Mrs. Eddy discovered, the shackles that prevent our accepting the God-Mind as our Mind will fall away. She makes it clear that in the Science of being no medium is needed. We need look nowhere but within our own enlightened consciousness, Mind, for the kingdom of God, since “God is at once the center and circumference of being.” The textbook of Christian Science is enlightening universal consciousness, and the world is progressing in spite of what looks like chaos on many fronts. This is what the next reference points out:

P. 72:20 Nothing save Science reveals progress....Truth pervades all space, needing no material method of transmitting its messages....The action of thought is losing its matter element, becoming spiritualized, expanding outside of fetters, and Science is pushing onward the centuries.

Danny: This is why Mrs. Eddy could define Science, our true being, as “the omnipresence of present perfection.”

Bessie: Could you explain?

Danny: First, because Truth, as she said, “pervades all space”; and when we realize the one Mind is our Mind, the kingdom of God is found as our own consciousness. We find we are self-governed. Our textbook instructs: “Christian Scientists, be a law unto yourselves” (1910 ed. 442:30).

We are a mother to ourselves, and give birth to the kingdom of heaven, the reign of harmony, within our own consciousness when we consistently “detach mortal thought from its material conceptions” (ibid. 463:8). In this way we remove the various veils that hide our present perfection. “No advancing modes of human mind made Jesus; rather was it their subjugation [the detaching of “mortal thought from its material conceptions”], and the pure heart that sees God” (Mis. 360:32).

Tommy: This would mean we no longer have to struggle to become what we already are and always have been. Of course, I realize that if we believe we are in the flesh, we must strive, as Jacob did, to see the truth. But Mrs. Eddy makes it clear that with the one Mind as our Mind there is no need for mediumship since the correcting or translating is all going on within our own enlightened consciousness. It is our Christ selfhood that does the translating. One definition of Christ is: “The divine manifestation of God which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error” (1910 ed. 583: 10).

Moderator: That’s right, Tommy. When we realize our Christ selfhood is capable of instantly translating any error, for the simple reason that perfection is always the fact, we realize our great need is to learn to accept. Accepting is a divine motherhood quality which sees perfection from the beginning, and never loses sight of this perfection.

Sally: This is why we are admonished to take the end, namely, perfection, from the beginning because, as Science and Health instructs: “to begin rightly is to end rightly.” If we begin with perfection, that is, if we go out from Spirit instead of from matter beliefs, we end right, we end with perfection.

Anna: To end rightly, i.e., to bring the demonstration of divinity to pass humanly, the “dominant power” of Science must be exercised from the beginning on “the sea, —upon elementary, latent error, the source of all error’s visible forms” (ibid. 559:4).

Moderator: That’s true, Anna.

AN EXPERIENCE SHOWING LIFE NEVER IN THE BODY

What else does she bring out in this chapter? Margie, what have you found?

Margie: There is much correcting of the false belief that life is in the body For instance:

P. 67:17: When Life is really gained outside of matter, it is understood, in which case the belief that Life was ever in the body is gone and cannot be resurrected; our friends thus advanced are Spirit, that never rose from dust and can no more return to, or commune with, matter than a blossom can return to its bud.

Moderator: A dear friend who is a Christian Science practitioner recently told me the following experience:

Her daughter died when the car in which she was riding crashed into a tree. The daughter’s crushed body gave this mother much sorrow. “One morning,” the mother said, “as I fervently prayed for light on the meaning of what seemed to me a terrible tragedy, a vision was instantly given me: I saw my daughter fully clothed, alive and whole, suspended about two feet above and beyond the scene of the accident, looking down at the crushed form of herself lying on the ground.

“In my vision there appeared to be two forms, a material and a spiritual, both appearing to be the same person. I distinctly heard my daughter say: ‘Why, I thought I was going to be hurt, and I haven’t even been touched.’ [The child’s experience, as seen in the mother’s vision, reminds us of Mrs. Eddy’s statement: “Death is the sudden surprise that there is no death” (first edition)].

“The fact that this vision and what I heard my daughter say came two weeks AFTER she appeared to leave us, proved to me, without a doubt, that there is no such thing as time and space.

“Then, three weeks after this vision, in the lesson, Mrs. Eddy’s words suddenly stood out to me with new meaning, ‘Man .. is always beyond and above the mortal illusion of any life, substance, and intelligence as existent in matter”‘ (1910 ed. 302:15).

At the start of this, the practitioner said, “I want to say that I usually begin my Christian Science work by thanking God for His infinite goodness, but this time in my utter agony and sorrow over the seeming loss of this beloved child, I had asked God for something. I had gone to infinite good in deep consecrated prayer, asking Him to show me what this experience meant; and to show it so that I could see it clearly. The vision came instantly.”

Bill: That was surely a most revealing answer. We in this class are able to grasp its true meaning. The practitioner caught a glimpse of “the divine Principle that obtains in divine Science, [which] destroys all error and brings immortality to light” (ibid. 305:25).

THE NORWOOD AND ARMSTRONG EXPERIENCES

Rocky: In a letter Mr. Norwood, a student of Mrs. Eddy’s, relates that during the 1898 Class, he prayed earnestly for a great unfoldment of good, a clearer vision.

Suddenly, on the second day, he said, a veil was lifted and he “could see in one of those supreme moments that never leave one where it finds him, the reality of things, the majestic oneness of the spiritual universe, its vast quietness, the infinite Mind, the eternal stillness which is really primal energy.

“And as I looked,” he said, “the symbols around me, the personalities, the class, all externals, faded, and a wondrous sense of reality appeared—and, ah, my friends, it was awesome! I realized, to some extent, the joy and activity of what is forever going on in Mind; and the only thing that hides it is the misty curtain of false beliefs, which lifts at intervals. I got a glimpse of the Way—the road our great Leader trod, the first to tread that road since Jesus walked in it. But, anon the veil dropped and I was back again.”

He tells of a similar experience 20 years later. That experience remained longer before fading, because it was a consequence of his own spiritual growth rather than in part a reflection from Mrs. Eddy’s thought, as it might have been characterized, during her teaching of the class.

Another student in the same class, Mr. Armstrong, tells of a similar experience just before the class while he was consulting with Mrs. Eddy about the coming class and what she hoped it would do for the world. “As she talked,” Mr. Armstrong relates, “the wonderful vista opened, and for a few moments I saw what she saw!” He said he never dreamed of such a heaven- on-earth, and added: “This was the mental state in which that God-blest woman abode, more or less, all the time!” (Both accounts preserved in Alice Orgain Library).

Moderator: Thank you, Rocky. Anna, you have something to say.

Anna: Yes. The visions just related are perfectly natural. In this chapter, Imposition and Demonstration, Mrs. Eddy makes it clear that “the generic name of matter is mind,” p. 113:27; and she gives an analysis of the true identities of being. Only spiritual ideas, not matter, constitute reality or true identity. Man’s divine selfhood consists of spiritual qualities outside of finite form.

Repeatedly we are taught that matter as material substance is no part of reality; that the immortal sense of existence can’t communicate with the mortal sense, since only like can communicate with like. In the case of the practitioner who saw her daughter in the vision, we can see it was complete trust that God would give her an answer and her ability to get self out of the way, that put her on God’s wave-length where God speaks to God. The healing vision appeared instantly. Immortal Mind is “supreme in the physical realm, so-called, as well as in the spiritual” (1910 ed. 427:24). Mr. Norwood and Mr. Armstrong were also able to see through the mist of error sufficiently to get their thought in line with infinite good in order to experience their visions.

Florence: When we look for it, we see the teaching of immortality on every page of the textbook. In Mr. Carpenter’s Spiritual Precepts of Mary Baker Eddy, we read Mrs. Eddy’s statement: “When we detect error as unreal, and God as all, we will be immortal.”

Mrs. Eddy was able to prove immortality. Several experiences have been recorded in which she had apparently crossed over what mortals call “the great divide.”

Bliss Knapp relates how on a business visit to Pleasant View, Mrs. Eddy healed his father, Ira Knapp, of desolating grief over the death of his wife. During their conversations Mrs. Eddy suddenly turned to his father, and said: “Ira, are you still babying that lie about your wife?” She then proceeded to give an audible treatment which resulted in completely healing Ira of all sense of grief and separation.

When Mrs. Eddy concluded her treatment, Ira, “rather apologetically,” said that he was glad to know that there was no more than a wall of partition between him and his wife. “At that, Mrs. Eddy leaned forward and said very forcefully, ‘But there is no wall! I see through that “wall”; she is right here!’ She then proceeded to tell father and me what my mother was doing at that time, but she soon saw we were not following her, and she changed the subject.”

When Mrs. Eddy spoke of immortality she was teaching something she had proved, as when she writes:

One moment of divine consciousness, or the spiritual understanding of Life and Love, is a foretaste of eternity. This exalted view, obtained and retained when the Science of being is understood, would bridge over with life discerned spiritually the interval of death, and man would be in the full consciousness of his immortality....(1910 ed. 598:23).

Moderator: Yes, the purity of Mrs. Eddy’s initial vision shows she suffered for the people’s sins, not her own. She could not have seen what she saw except the door was opened in heaven— and only purity can open that door.

MATTER CORRECTLY DEFINED

On a more mundane level, the mental nature of the universe is becoming increasingly apparent to thoughtful people. Sir James Jeans in The Mysterious Universe insists matter is resolving itself into a manifestation of mind. Other physical scientists are seeing all is a construction of consciousness.

In Science of Man (her 1870 handwritten manuscript) Mrs. Eddy states: “All that is called matter in the physical world is the idea of Truth, the idea of Principle, and therefore all is Good.”

We have already seen her statement in the first edition where, speaking of God as Intelligence, she tells us, “the personal belief that man is a separate mind from God ... is the only devil there is.” This makes it clear we can be intelligent and discerning because we are being Mind.

The mortal sense of man as a matter body is misconception and tyranny, the imposition of mortal mind. The immortal sense is harmony. It was the harmony of Jesus’ mentality that restored Lazarus.

Rookie: How did Jesus see Lazarus?

Francy: In Science of Man Mrs. Eddy states, “Matter held as shadow is the idea of God, but matter held as substance is a belief and error.” Jesus must have translated into Mind what looked like a matter body called Lazarus, and must have seen that Mind can’t die and be put into a tomb. (See Mis. 60:23-10.) “Had Jesus believed that Lazarus had lived or died in his body, the Master would have stood on the same plane of belief as those who buried the body, and he could not have resuscitated it” (1910 ed. 75:16).

In Essays and Other Footprints Richard Oakes ends his Foreword with the following statement:

Calvin Frye records a wonderful remark which perhaps explains how she sought to remove misconceptions about words which had developed set meanings [words like “matter”]....“What thou needest to know is that mortal mind has translated the body and its functions into matter, and immortal Mind gives back the original with its functions preserved and harmonious, but not as not in matter, but as and of Mind.”

Margie: Mind’s ideas are always tangible to spiritual sense, i.e. they will look like matter, having form, outline, and color. She further explains the real meaning of matter in Christian Healing, p. 7:6, where she writes:

“The new tongue” is the spiritual meaning as opposed to the material. It is the language of Soul instead of the senses; it translates matter into its original language which is Mind, and gives the spiritual instead of the material signification.

Isn’t she telling us here that the “man” with whom we daily have contact is the spiritual man? It is just a matter of standpoint. Mary Baker Eddy and Jesus—because of their spirtuality and spiritual point of view—beheld in Science the perfect man who appeared to [them] where sinning mortal man appears to mortals” (1910 ed. 476:32).

In our present textbook we also read: “Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul. These ideas are perfectly real and tangible to spiritual consciousness” (269:14). Again: “The individuality of man is no less tangible because it is spiritual .... “ (ibid. 317:16).

SPIRITUAL AWARENESS ANNIHILATES DUALISTIC BELIEFS

Florence: This chapter, Imposition and Demonstration, is very concerned with how we can uncover dualism and annihilate it.

Rookie: How?

Florence: We annihilate dualistic beliefs by accepting in thought ultimate spiritual reality. Establishing our true identity as Spirit, Soul, Principle, rids us of dualism. But understanding is necessary.

In this chapter Mrs. Eddy makes a big shift from the prevalent materiality to mentality, and then shows that only that mentality which is spiritual is real. What is not deduced from God, Spirit, is not real. As the teaching of the textbook is assimilated, reason and revelation are reconciled, and we exchange illusions for reality.

Science teaches us that in reality it is merely a false belief that there are mortal minds to be destroyed before man becomes spiritual. Nothing needs to be removed except the veils, the misconceptions that hide present perfection. There is no mediumship involved in the demonstrations of Jesus and Mary Baker Eddy, or of their spiritually enlightened followers. It is spiritual illumination and divine insight that empower them, enabling them to understand and demonstrate their God-being, as Jesus did in his consummate example when he stepped forth from the grave in which his body had lain three days.

Margie: Truth must uncover, bring to the surface, and overcome the latent mortal mind concepts that lie deep in the subconscious. Note what admitting ourselves Soul will do:

P. 76:32: To admit one’s self Soul instead of body sets us free to master the infinite idea.

Bessie: What is the infinite idea?

Sally: When we admit that we are Soul, in fact when we admit we are Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love, which combine as one, then “the infinite idea” is the infinite idea of these seven synonyms for God, regarding which Mrs. Eddy says: “The divine Principle includes them all” (My. 225:29). The “infinite idea” is the idea of Principle, and she here teaches that we must regard ourselves Principle; for how else can we find the Principle we need to work from if we don’t find it within our God-consciousness? How can we find the kingdom of heaven “within” if we don’t find it within our consciousness? When we understand as Truth understands we are conscious only of ideas. The infinite idea is the Christ- consciousness.

Spiritual education—through “the system that she denominated Christian Science”—will lead to, or draw forth, this kingdom. How could mathematics or music be brought out of us—how could we learn them—if they were not already latent within our consciousness?

Mrs. Eddy saw that Jesus claimed Principle as a practical, ever active living power to be utilized. She saw that neither Jesus nor we can utilize our divine Principle, Love, until we discover it to be our own divine consciousness. When we understand as Principle understands, our understanding is invested and leavened with the interpretation of the divine system of Christian Science. We are all destined to see that our “I” (our consciousness) is “divine Principle; Spirit; Soul; incorporeal, unerring, immortal, and eternal Mind” (1910 ed. 588:9). We experience this “I” now, when consciousness is spiritually illumined.

GENERIC MAN (GOD), NOT DIVIDED

Moderator: Would anyone like to add to this brief synopsis of the first part of this chapter?

Grace: A recurring refrain in this chapter sets forth the great revelation that man, expression, doesn’t have a separate mind or existence from God. She also continues her explanation that if man, expression or manifestation, could have a mind apart from infinite good, God, there would be more than the one Mind. She indicates it was the Adam-dream that divided generic man (God) into men, gods (spirits). Principle and its idea is one” (1910 ed. 465:17). Principle is all-power and all-presence; there is nothing besides Principle. Generic man is another name for the coincidence of the divine Principle and the divine idea. They are one.

Danny: The discernment that it was the Adam-dream that divided generic man (God), into “men,” gods, was a world- shattering discovery. Mrs. Eddy tells us, “man epitomizes the universe, and is the body of God” (p. 229:15). This would mean that man and the universe is the undivided thought-body of Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love, which makes up our true identity.

Margie: I think what she is saying here is that God-the Mind of man-and its idea is one entity. In other words, “Principle and its idea is one”; Mind cannot be separated from Mind’s manifestation.

Through spiritual sense, Mrs. Eddy made the discovery “that the body of Soul embraces the universe” (229:21).

Moses: It is important to note Mrs. Eddy never says we are man except in the sense that man is one with God, the image of God, and we the Soul and substance of the image. In countless ways, she reveals that “we are Soul; we are Spirit,” and will find ourselves “more blessed as Principle than as person, as God than man”; and as this is understood, we find the answer to every problem within our ever-present divine consciousness. We have just read her categorical statement: “to admit one’s self Soul instead of body, sets us free to master the infinite idea.”

She makes it clear that there isn’t some power outside our consciousness— some power other than “the kingdom of God within you”—to which we pray for freedom or to change the testimony of the senses and terminate our problems. The answer is already within consciousness; only spiritualization, spiritual understanding, is needed.

Florence: In the first edition Mrs. Eddy emphasizes Christ is God. She, herself, demonstrated the Mind of Christ by starting every thought from God—the one Mind or Principle, the kingdom of heaven, which she found within her consciousness —or she could not have written the textbook in fulfillment of Jesus’ prophecy regarding the Comforter which would complete his work on earth.

OUR TRUE MIND HAS “THE SEED WITHIN ITSELF”

Moderator: In this chapter Mrs. Eddy explains that the harmony and immortality of man and the universe cannot appear until the impositions of mortal mind, animal magnetism, are exposed, so that “thinking brains and intelligent bodies are found a myth.” Remember, “in the illusion of life that is here today and gone tomorrow, man would be wholly mortal, were it not that Love, the divine Principle that obtains in divine Science, destroys all error and brings immortality to light” (1910 ed. 305:23).

When we begin in earnest to challenge the false beliefs held since the obscure aeons of prehistory and which have been relentlessly drilled into mankind, we will start to make progress in freeing ourselves. The educated beliefs that make the universal appearance and conditions of the waking dream seem so real will begin to disappear, and our God-being with its innate harmony—which has always been present—will “reappear.” (See Pul. 1:18.)

Sally: The discovery that the one Mind is also our Mind, and is the power of God, will bring the perception that all things are under the control of the one Mind, our Mind, and will hasten the reappearance of oneness with all good.

Florence: When we have developed the spiritual sense that can “sensibly feel” the perfection of all mankind, we have the “seed within ourselves.”

Marie: How does the mortal discover or gain this “seed within,” which Mrs. Eddy so obviously implies is a “must,” in this chapter?

Moderator: Each individual consciousness has the seed within itself. Through gaining an understanding of the Word—the Science contained in the textbook—this seed develops. “But the seed is in itself, only as the divine Mind is All and reproduces all—as Mind is the multiplier, and Mind’s infinite idea, man and the universe, is the product” (1910 ed. 508:2).

Anna: It’s very important to remember that the power always remains within the Principle and is never in the expression of the Principle; 2 X 2 = 4 is an expression of the mathematical principle, but it has no power in or of itself.

Moderator: Yes, and in the same way, “the seed is in itself” only as the divine Mind or Principle is all and reproduces all. The only reason it can appear to human sense with its multiplicity of individuality— meaning that individual consciousness has the seed within itself—is because there is only one individuality, and it has the seed within itself since it is God. We must be clear when we say “each one,” that we are not thinking of many minds, inasmuch as there is only the ONE infinite individuality. And, as Anna explained, the power is in the Principle, in the Mind; never in the expression.

Florence: As we study the seven synonymous terms for God the ideas that characterize the synonyms will manifest as our consciousness which is the working of the sevenfold nature of God. Remember: Mrs. Eddy teaches “We are Spirit”; and what can be conscious of the qualities of Spirit such as purity, reality, order, good, unfoldment, strength, etc., except Spirit itself? So, it is not that our consciousness is being influenced by the divine ideas of the seven synonyms for God, but rather it is the dawning of Truth—the coming to light of those ideas of Spirit, an awareness— and this appears to the material senses as the fading out of the material sense, the fading out of error.

Moderator: That’s right, Florence, nothing can act except that which we sum up as the term God; and it cannot act on anything other than itself. It acts in accordance with its own nature; it expresses its own nature. When we note Mrs. Eddy has used ideas such as reality, purity, order, etc., to characterize Spirit, then we know the consciousness of these ideas is Spirit’s consciousness. It couldn’t be anything else. There is no lesser consciousness being influenced by Spirit. There is no lesser power; there is no duality.

Marie: Mrs. Eddy says that “a condition precedent to communion with Spirit is the gain of spiritual life” (ibid. 72:6).

Moderator: Yes, Marie, and this second chapter returns again and again to teach us that the immortal sense of existence cannot commune with the mortal sense, that only like speaks to like. Spiritual sense alone can communicate with reality, with Spirit. As the mortal advances spiritually, he finds that “Science never returns him to a position that Truth has destroyed.” In our next reference she states:

P. 96:25: The dream of Life and Intelligence in matter is destroyed when heaven, man’s harmony, is reached. The dead to personal sense are alive to Soul and preserve all the prerogatives of being, but because personal sense buries their bodies it loses sight of this fact, showing virtually we are separated...for there is no conscious change to themselves; hence we lose sight of each other. We are holding to a belief of them as dead…else we would not bury the body, and the old and familiar faces would not disappear.

Bill: The hereafter is a beautiful recurring theme in the Imposition part of the chapter. The ingrained belief that we are matter bodies, and that Life and intelligence blend with matter is the foundation of all misunderstanding of God and man, Mrs. Eddy tells us. It is clear that we succumb to “imposition” and are spiritualists to the extent that we erroneously believe Spirit needs matter through which to express itself; and that life is only present as long as the material form, the body, breathes and the heart functions.

But this imposition—this claim pushed by the diabolical logic of the serpent—will fade out as Science supplants ignorance. We are assured repeatedly that “we shall prove that we are Spirit that mixes not with matter,” and so cannot sicken, grow old, and die. Science has come to awaken us to reality, to the fact that we are a state of “sinless joy,—the perfect harmony and immortality of Life, possessing unlimited divine beauty and goodness” (1910 ed. 76:22)-in which there is no death:

P. 77:1: [Science] shuts the door on death, and opens it wide on immortality. The belief that God has a separate being leads to multitudinous errors, in which phenomena are ascribed to supernatural and personal causes.

Tommy: Science can open the door to immortality because we learn in Science that “we are Soul.” Soul and its changeless identity, expression, awareness, are one; and Soul is characterized by spiritual understanding and immortal bliss. We grow in understanding until finally we have no sense of separation from God and discover our Mind is the power of God; then imposition ceases, and all conceptions of infinite good are available to us.

Moderator: With that in mind we will turn to the Demonstration part of the “little book’s” second chapter.

CHAPTER II:

IMPOSITION AND DEMONSTRATION

(Continued)

PART II

PART II: DEMONSTRATION

Moderator: Mrs. Eddy, like Jesus, was able to demonstrate what she taught, and today we will took at Demonstration, the second part of the first edition’s Chapter 11, in which she will make it clear the only demonstration needed is the demonstration over misunderstanding.

The first part of this chapter, Imposition—from which we examined excerpts at our last session explained the murderous inflictions of mortal mind, as well as the oneness of God and understanding. Now, in the last half of the chapter, the challenge is to demonstrate our supremacy over the impositions of mortal mind. The impositions of the carnal mind have been exposed, and through our “deep and conscientious protests of Truth” demonstration takes place.

So, here in Demonstration, the second part, we are instructed that we must show forth the dominion inherent in our divine status or identity as Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love, which the text has taught us we are. “[Jesus],” Mrs. Eddy says, “established the proof that he was Christ, and that Christ is God, the Soul and Life of man” (126:21). The Christ has the dynamic power necessary to exclude error and abide in Truth.

To show forth the same dominion Jesus had, requires emptying the mind of misconceptions for “ye cannot fill vessels already full.”

SELF-RENUNCIATION OF THE MORTAL NEEDED

Demonstration will now deal largely with Jesus’ demonstration over mortal mind’s “impositions”—those impositions which were analyzed and uncovered in the first part. The second part of this chapter is also actually Mrs. Eddy’s autobiography, her life story, showing how she “was led into the mazes of divine metaphysics through the gospel of suffering, the providence of God, and the cross of Christ.” No one else can drain the cup which she drank to the dregs as the Discoverer and great teacher of Christian Science. But, as she says, “neither can its inspiration be gained without tasting this cup” (Ret. 30:23).

Anna: Of this experience Mrs. Eddy said, “The loss of material objects of affection sunders the dominant ties of earth and points to heaven” (ibid. 31:1). It was this total “sundering” that enabled her to complete the work of Christ Jesus, and reveal God’s womanhood.

Moderator: Yes, Anna, and Part 11, Demonstration, will now give an account of Jesus’ triumphs over every illusion of matter as substance, over every belief that man is a mortal separated from God, divine Mind;—how Jesus proved himself to be Spirit, infinite good; how he courageously pushed onward until his conception was unconfined, “winged to reach the divine glory.”

MRS. EDDY’S UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS

Emma Newman, a student in one of Mrs. Eddy classes, left the revealing description that “when Mrs. Eddy spoke of Christ Jesus, it seemed as if time and space—the barrier of two milleniums and two hemispheres— were swept away”

Regarding Jesus, Mrs. Eddy fulfilled the Book of Revelation’s prophecy (1: 17, 18): “...I am he that was dead [not understood]; and behold, I am alive for evermore, [Science has explained me].” Mrs. Eddy could explain, could unfold Jesus because her Jesus was her own mentality; thus she could complete his work on earth.

Her mission—symbolized in the Book of Revelation (12th chapter) by the dual role of the God-crowned woman and the wilderness woman—was to bring mankind the Comforter, the Science, contained in the “little book open” in the hand of the mighty angel. The book reveals, step by step, how we, like Jesus, can unmask evil, animal magnetism, and find ourself one with the divine Mind, Spirit.

WHAT THE GOD-CROWNED WOMAN SYMBOLIZES

The God-crowned woman in heaven is not only a symbol of Mary Baker Eddy’s mission, but is also a symbol of our consciousness which we will realize when we awaken to reality through an understanding of Science. The awakening comes when the divine Science contained in the “little book” has been assimilated and has become our consciousness— when human consciousness, freed of all illusions, has become one with reality But she makes it clear that the “divine must overcome the human at every point” and that Truth never pardons error except through correction.

The twelve stars that crown the woman, or spiritual idea, represent the fact that “all mortals,—separated by belief from man’s divine origin and the true idea,— will through much tribulation yield to the activities of the divine Principle of man in the harmony of Science” (1910 ed. 562:12), that is, they will regain an understanding of their divine origin and ever-present harmony.

Demonstration (the second part of this chapter) tells us that Christian Science restores the purely spiritual concept of humanity. By continually declaring the truth about ourselves, our divine authority, power, and dominion are restored.

“Human beings,” Mrs. Eddy explained, “are physically mortal, but spiritually immortal” (Un. 37:17).

CORRELATION OF BRIDEGROOM AND BRIDE

Rocky: All this has nothing to do with whether, in the human, we are a man or a woman, does it?

Abraham: Of course not! “Woman” is a symbol-note: a symbol for complete spiritual understanding. When we gain spiritual understanding we are “bride” or “Woman.” In other words, Science.

Elsie: Why did Jesus refer to himself as the “bridegroom”?

Abraham: Because he had wedded himself to the Science of being. Remember, Mrs. Eddy says, “the bride (Word) [Science and Health] is adorned, and lo, the bridegroom cometh” (My. 125:26). We are the bridegroom wedding ourself to the bride, Science, the writings of Mary Baker Eddy. We are “bride” proportionately as we have assimilated her teaching, which includes the teaching of Jesus

Rookie: I know that as we assimilate her teaching, and the structure of our consciousness becomes one with the structure of reality, we are generic man, but could we have a little further explanation without getting in too deep?

ALICE ORGAIN EXPLAINS PICTURE NO. ONE

Moderator: Yes, Rookie. Moses, could you tell Rookie and the class what you read to me, during our recess, from Alice Orgain’s book, Angelic Overtures of “Christ and Christmas,” page 12? So much of what Mrs. Orgain patiently and repeatedly expounded has a direct relationship to this Demonstration. part of Chapter II.

Moses: We in this class know that the illustrations in Mrs. Eddy’s Christ and Christmas do not refer “to personality, but present the type and shadow of Truth’s appearing in the womanhood as well as in the manhood of God” (Mis. 33:8).

Explaining the first picture in Christ and Christmas, Mrs. Orgain points out that as we have the picture today, the cloud-formed head of the woman in the upper right-hand corner has a man’s head as her crown. This was not always the case.

This cloud-formed head of the woman had from the very first edition of Christ and Christmas seemed to be wearing a simple crown. Not until the last revision in 1910 did Mrs. Eddy remove this crown and replace it with a man’s head as characterizing the nature of the crown of heavenly woman, who, Mrs. Eddy said— at the point of the completion of her revelation— “symbolizes generic [whole, complete] man” (1910 ed. 561:22).

This crowning of Woman’s head showed that “the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse [which] typifies the divine method of warfare in Science” had reached “the glorious results of this warfare” (ibid. 568:5).

Rookie: How?

Moses: In the sense that the wilderness -woman (Rev. 12:6) through her writing and teaching—had lifted up the human consciousness as her “man child,” to oneness with “Truth” (1910 ed. 517:8-9), as the “man child” of the God-crowned woman. You remember it was prophesied (Rev. 12:5) that this man child would be “caught up unto God, and to His throne.” While we can’t go into it now, this man child symbolizes the manhood and womanhood of God, or generic man, that will “lead on the centuries” (My. 347:3).

When the head of manhood was placed as a crown upon the head of womanhood in 1910 (in this first picture) it signaled that the mission of Womanhood was triumphant, and had revealed her “successor” (ibid).

Rookie: Why?

Moses: Because the God-crowned Woman (symbolized by the revealing, subjective consciousness of Mrs. Eddy) and the wilderness- woman (symbolized by the founding or objective consciousness of Mrs. Eddy) had become one.

Sally: All this concerns us, doesn’t it? It is our consciousness that is being “caught up unto God,” unto perfect spiritual understanding, and it is this understanding that will “lead on the centuries and reveal [Mrs. Eddy’s] successor.”

Moses: Yes. The world did not know it but with the Advent of Mary Baker Eddy’s discovery and revelation of Christian Science, humanity approached the greatest watershed in the history of mankind—spiritual or otherwise.

SCIENCE SUCCESSFULLY FACES ALL PROBLEMS

Kathleen: Does Mrs. Orgain point out anything else of great significance in this first picture?

Moses: Yes, many things. For instance, speaking of the difference between the First and Second Coming of the Christ, Mrs. Orgain says that the difference in the two processes is shown in the way Mrs. Eddy depicts “the Holy Family” as an ascending idea, which turns its back on the human consciousness. This is in line with Christianity’s “Get thee behind me Satan”; while the cloud-formed head of the woman (in the upper right-hand corner of this picture) symbolizes Science. This “Woman,” Science, prayerfully faces all problems.

The problems that Science (Woman) faces here are the more subtle forms of the human consciousness such as “lust and hypocrisy” symbolized in this picture by the two divisions of the dragon’s tail.

Science faces these problems until it overcomes their resistance to Truth.

This illustrates the difference between Christianity (which rose above error, symbolized by Jesus in his First Coming), and Science (which demands the facing and scientific overcoming of error by each individual consciousness), symbolized by Jesus’ Second Coming with the Advent of Mary Baker Eddy. We must face error. That’s the way to find out it’s all front and no back. Behind its deceptive mask is never anything but Love’s care and goodwill. It is therefore stimulating and comforting to recall, often, that the first edition promises (29:21): “we shall ultimately prove this Science to individual consciousness.”

Moderator: Thank you, Moses. Alice Orgain speaks to the head and heart of the explanation-hungry listener. Her rare spiritual insight greatly illumines the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, showing, as we have already noted, how Mrs. Eddy fulfilled every Bible prophecy concerning her mission.

Danny: Mrs. Orgain was also firm in acknowledging that no one knows anything about Christian Science except as it has come through Mary Baker Eddy, God’s revelator to this age. (See Foreword to Miscellany.)

Anna: Yes, Mrs. Orgain was truly an inspired writer. She had rare vision, the art of seeing the invisible. Of her 1055-page book dealing with Mrs. Eddy’s Christ and Christmas, 56 pages are devoted to an interpretation of this first picture. Her glorious supersensible excursions into the realm of the spiritual single her out as the most spiritually minded woman to follow in the wake of the advent of Mary Baker Eddy’s writings and teaching—the Second Coming of the Christ.

THE UPLIFTING AND BLESSING OF CALVIN HILL

Moderator: Rocky, will you read your next reference from the Demonstration part of this chapter?

P. 126:15: “He maketh himself as God,” was the foundation of all accusations against [Jesus]; and the indignities he met, his followers must now meet, until this Truth is understood....He wrought through the Science of being, the example of salvation from sin, sickness, and death, and established the proof that he was Christ, and that Christ is God, the Soul and Life of man.

Every good word and work of our Master evoked but denial, ingratitude, and persecution from sensualism and malice.

Danny: In the final edition Mrs. Eddy, speaking from experience, tells us, “the earthly price of spirituality in a material age and the great moral distance between Christianity and sensualism preclude Christian Science from finding favor with the worldly-minded” (36:14). But great is the reward of those who overcome sensuality. We see this reward in the case of the Magdalen out of whom Jesus had cast “seven devils.”

It was the Magdalen’s healing of sensuality that enabled her to rise sufficiently to recognize Jesus after his resurrection, and alert the other disciples, who might otherwise not have been receptive enough to discern the “risen Savior,” since they regarded him as dead and so were not looking for him.

Moderator: Calvin Hill, Mrs. Eddy’s student whom we mentioned earlier, must have seen that sensuality would stand in the way of his gaining a true understanding of Christian Science. In an interview with Mrs. Eddy he requested her to help him jettison this encumbrance that threatened his highest attainment in the line of light. He said, “I wish you would point out to me some places in Science and Health that will enable me to overcome the thought of lust and sensuality.”

To this, he says, Mrs. Eddy responded most emphatically, “I will!” She then lifted her eyes with that far-off look, as though she saw into the very heart of heaven. She denounced the Adam-dream and thoroughly exposed its falsity. He says that she showed him the nothingness of mortality over and over, and the reality of spiritual creation. “She supplanted the garment of flesh with the robe of Spirit. I felt that I had been lifted to the mount of transfiguration. For a number of days all I could think of, all I could hear, was what Mrs. Eddy had said to me in answer to my question.”

The light that dawned upon him during that talk—the great illumination of the reality of Spirit and the nothingness of matter—dwelt with him in all its glory through the passing years and enabled him to understand ever more fully her revelation.

From that time on, he says, he was a different man, and felt warranted in saying that on that wonderful day he experienced a measure of spiritual “new birth”.

Later, of course, he said he had to learn that being lifted up by another, even by our Leader, is not working out one’s own salvation; that is, there is no vicarious atonement. He saw he had to work his own way up the hill of Science, that he had to prove in his own experience the truth she had affirmed to him— he had to work it out in demonstration. (Reminiscence, in We Knew Mary Baker Eddy.)

SPIRITUALITY AND SENSUALITY NOT TRAVELING COMPANIONS

Continuing with the first edition Mrs. Eddy indicates in the next reference that while the theory is extremely important, it is what we actually live and put into practice of the letter of Christian Science that counts in the end.

P. 125:4: It is a skeleton of religion that requires a doctor of physic to save the body and a doctor of divinity to save what? immortal Soul that is already saved. This is not having “Christ in you the hope of glory,” nor does it cast out devils and heal the sick. The manger and the cross tell in vain their story to pride and prejudice. Taking wealth, popularity and sensuality by the right hand, takes God by the left, and palsies that hand, making moral lepers instead of Christians. Hear our Master’s words on this subject, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

Moses: In an Essay, False and True, Mrs. Eddy begins:

‘Christian Science has come to stay!’ Yes, but on what terms or conditions? I will name a few of those terms: ‘He that would be master, let him be your servant.’ ‘He that is least among you shall be greatest.’ ‘Except ye leave all for me ye cannot be my disciple.’

But you say that Christian Science has come to stay on the present existing condition: Who shall be greatest? I will serve for money and popularity, but when it comes to taking up the cross I will desert. I will leave a portion of the false claims of the senses but I will retain other portions, for I cannot get on without this half-way obedience.... This is] ‘crying peace, peace; when there is no peace.’ (EOF. p. 21).

It was the sensualism in the mind of the people that caused both Jesus and Mrs. Eddy (because of the purity of their thought) to be hated in the respective age in which they labored. The perfection and spirituality of their thought was an ever-present rebuke; the people did not know how to interpret the discomfort arising from this divine teaching, and the God-presence dwelling with them.

WHAT MEN REALLY SAW WAS “THE WORD MADE FLESH”

The next reference from the first edition tells us why Jesus had to appear in the flesh, as a mortal, at his time in human history.

P. 130:24: [Jesus] bore their sins in his own person; that is, he felt the suffering their error brought, and through this consciousness destroyed error. Had the Master utterly conquered the belief of Life in matter, he would not have felt their infirmities; he had not yet risen to this his final demonstration.

Moderator: Before we discuss this passage let’s remind ourselves of the wonderful enlightenment that came to a friend when she read John’s Gospel and Epistles through consecutively: “What emerged was that there was no person named Jesus. What men witnessed was ‘the Word made flesh.”‘

On page 30:5-13 (1910 ed.) Mrs. Eddy gives the answer regarding why the Saviour appeared to mortal mind as the man, Jesus, ending with “Had his origin and birth been wholly apart from mortal usage, Jesus would not have been appreciable to mortal mind as ‘the way.”‘ Nevertheless, all the while men thought they were seeing a Jesus, what they were actually witnessing was “the Word made flesh.”

Francy: As has been brought out before in these discussions: not once only in the history of humanity was “the Word made flesh,” but actually every day and every hour, as healings occur through this Christ Science, the Word is made flesh. Whenever the spiritual power of a scientific right thought heals sickness, sin, or discord of any nature, we can rightfully say “the Word was made flesh.”

Moderator: That’s right, Francy. Margie, would you like to make a further comment on the statement we just read from the first edition?

Margie: That statement, as well as the Bible record, indicates, doesn’t it, that Jesus didn’t at the beginning of his divine career have the complete answer, but that he grew in understanding until he entered into full communion with God, his true Christ selfhood?

Anna: Yes. He taught “the kingdom of God is within you”; but he only found this “kingdom within” through his life experiences. A gradual growth out of the mortal sense of things enabled him to finally gain total dominion. This made him the Way-shower.

Rookie: Doesn’t the Gospel of John also imply this gradual growth in understanding when, more than once, it quotes his statement, “My time hath not yet come”? This saying would indicate that he waited for greater understanding to feel completely confident he could make the greater demonstration—-that he waited for greater and fuller understanding before attempting higher, more profound demonstrations?

Anna: Yes, that assessment, “My time has not yet come,” is not a picture of God’s Jesus but of men’s Jesus, and it suggests he progressively, step-by-step, attained dominion; that it was a gradual spiritual growth; that it took time for him to think things out; that he arrived only by degrees at the sovereign authority that could issue the command, “Lazarus, come forth.”

Danny: Shortly after the tremendous demonstration of power he gave in restoring to life a man who had lain in the grave four days, Jesus felt ready for the final great push onward, and announced: “My time is at hand.” He had grown in understanding until he felt confident he could accomplish his sublime victory over death and the grave.

Tommy: From the beginning Jesus had cast his “anchor of hope beyond the veil of matter”; he saw through the facade of mortality and death, and his vision, from the outset, brought him face to face with Life eternal.

Moderator: Yes, Tommy, he saw the Science of creation, his divine origin, which we are all destined to understand, as Mrs. Eddy tells us:

The time cometh when the spiritual origin of man, the divine Science which ushered Jesus into human presence, will be understood and demonstrated. (1910 ed. 325:26).

Born of a Virgin-mother, Jesus appeared to mortals in a form of humanity which they could understand and perceive. This enabled him to be the Way-shower, to be the first to demonstrate Life in spiritual existence and, as Mrs. Eddy states, to demonstrate the Science of Love—his divine Principle. (See 19 10 ed. 30:3.)

Corporeal sense doesn’t understand real Life which is Love. Christian Science has come to awaken humanity to the Life which Jesus demonstrated, and to teach us how we all can do what he did. But Life in and of Spirit can be attained only as consciousness becomes one with divine Science-the Science that lay behind the works he did. We must and will, then do the works he did.

Rocky: How is it possible for us to do the works he did?

JESUS’ PIONEER WORK AS THE WAY-SHOWER

Abraham: First, it is important to remember that the man Jesus, the symbol Jesus, was a human being like you and me. He did, of course, have the advantage of a more spiritual birth. But today we have a similar advantage: the coming of the Comforter, divine Science, reveals the scientific obstetrics by means of which we can “detach mortal thought from its material conceptions” and so give birth to our true divine selfhood, our oneness with God.

Francy: Michelangelo felt there was an angel trapped and waiting in each block of marble. There is an angel, the kingdom of God, within the consciousness of each one of us, waiting to be set free and experienced; and Christian Science has come to show us how this !freedom can be won and experienced. Mrs. Eddy reminds us, “We are all sculptors, working out our own ideals, and leaving the impress of mind on the body as well as on history....Recognizing this as we ought, we shall turn often from marble to model, from matter to Mind, to beautify and exalt our lives” (Peo. 7: 1). Set yourself eagerly to see what you were made to do; and then set yourself fervently to do it!

Margie: The whole human race owes Jesus a tremendous debt of gratitude for demonstrating that it is possible to work out of the false belief that we live in a matter body. He revealed the truth about ourselves. He demonstrated that God is not in matter—that there is no life, truth, intelligence, or substance in matter. He did it by bridging with his own body the vast chasm that yawned between mortal belief and spiritual understanding. His example (in the First Messianic Advent, showing that it could be done), together with Mary Baker Eddy’s bringing of the Science (the Second Messianic Advent explaining how he did it) makes it possible today for each of us also to do the works he did.

Francy: On the mundane level, we all have seen feats accomplished that were thought humanly impossible. But when one person finally did it, the mesmerism was broken and others quickly decided they too could do it. In the Olympics we have seen records broken countless times. For many years no one was able to swim the Straits of Juan de Fuca because of the extremely cold water. The feat was finally accomplished when a man trained relentlessly by spending hours daily in a pool of floating ice. Once he made it across the Straits, demonstrating it could be done, others were able to do it also.

The English Channel is probably still the most taxing of long-distance swims, but in the 109 years since Capt. Mathew Webb first demonstrated that it could be conquered 261 aspirants have made it across.

After Lindberg flew the Atlantic, others followed in quick succession. Now that men have walked on the moon, it may soon become routine.

The great man is the man who does a great thing for the first time.

These mundane feats may seem trivial compared to what Jesus accomplished. Nevertheless the same principle is involved in them as in the sublime example he set when he solved all phases of animal magnetism “in his mighty, crowning, unparalleled and triumphant exit from the flesh.” Emulating his example is more difficult only because humanity is shackled with the cast-iron belief, dating from the dawn of mortal consciousness, from the Adam-dream, that life and mind are in the body. This belief has bolted humanity into place; the testimony of the physical senses has chained the human family to this viewpoint.

Bessie: What can free mankind?

Anna: Only “spiritualization of thought and Christianization of daily life” which are “in contrast with the ghastly farce of material existence”; only “chastity and purity in contrast with the downward tendencies and earthward gravitation of sensualism and impurity” (1910 ed. 272:19).

We must become not only watchful sentinels but also spiritual explorers in the vast realm of Christian Science in order to awaken to the privilege of knowing our true God-being and the glorious liberty and dominion which is our present status in reality and only awaits our recognition.

Again, it is the evangelization of the human self, and the growth in Christian character to where it comes into line with the divine goodness that is the only reality. This alone can free humanity.

To mortal sense Jesus was a man. Mrs. Eddy has shown us our true identity is Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love, but because the wool has been pulled over our eyes by the Adam-dream, we think of ourselves as man, as separated from our God-being. Thus Jesus had to come in the form of a man to show us how to awaken ourselves from this dream of being a mortal. His great value to the human race was that he showed men that if he could do it they could also do it—- in fact, must do it. We have no choice. “Mortals... can never turn back what Deity knoweth, nor escape from identification with what dwelleth in the eternal Mind” (Un. 64:15).

JESUS’ TOTAL DISPOSAL OF LIFE IN MATTER

Sally: Jesus solved the whole problem of animal magnetism, showing it could be done.

Bessie: Could you enlarge on that?

Florence: He proved that human birth and death were both imposters—that the very heart and essence of animal magnetism is the belief in human birth.

Bessie: Please expand.

Florence: Mrs. Eddy explains he did it by understanding the Science of his own being. This enabled him to supplant with Truth the Adam-dream lie which said life and intelligence, or God, are in matter and therefore the Adam-dream man, namely, mortals, “shall be as gods” (Gen. 3:5).

God is the only Life; there is no mortal life. God is the only Mind, there is no mortal mind; a mortal sense of life and mind is an illusion. “Either here or hereafter, suffering or Science must destroy all illusions regarding life and mind, and regenerate material sense and self” (1910 ed. 296:6).

Bessie: I understand better now. What Jesus did was to replace the Adam-dream lie that said, “Ye shall be as gods”—meaning the mortal would have life and intelligence in his material body—with the truth that there is no life, substance or intelligence in matter.

Florence: Yes. Mrs. Eddy explains Jesus could do this because he knew Mind is the creator, and Mind’s creations are spiritual, altogether good, and immortal. Precisely and meticulously Mrs. Eddy makes it clear that the Christ Mind is the only Mind. It is the Mind we now have when our Mind is free of animal magnetism’s murderous misconceptions and illusions. It is the only creator, and its creations are always according to the law of Love. They are immortal, divinely mental, wholly spiritual.

Rookie: How does that help us?

Florence: We are enabled and empowered to make our exit from the flesh through abiding strictly by the teaching of Mary Baker Eddy—the teaching that is the Second Coming of the Christ. Science and Health will prove to be our spiritual Mother because by means of the Science and system it infolds and unfolds, we can give birth to our Christ selfhood. Through this divine Science and system we are reborn—born of Truth and Love, in accordance with Jesus’ promise that the Comforter would “teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:26).

Rookie: How?

Florence: Detaching mortal thought from its material conceptions is the way to start, never being content with what we have already done, but pushing on in the habitual struggle to be always good. Do what you can—that is, practice—right where you are, what you have already learned. In this way all great developments of ideas come modestly and silently to birth and fruition.

Mrs. Eddy wisely admonished:

Whoever would demonstrate the Healing of Christian Science must abide strictly by its rules, heed every statement, and advance from the rudiments laid down....self-denial, sincerity, Christianity, and persistence alone win the prize, as they usually do in every department of life. (1910 ed. 462:13).

[Also] The devotion of thought to an honest achievement makes the achievement possible. (Ibid. 199:21).

JESUS’ ACTUAL CONQUEST OF DEATH

Elsie: We won’t experience the divine Mind’s power much until mortal belief loses satisfaction in error sufficiently to part with it, will we?

Moderator: That’s right, Elsie. How long it will take for mortals to learn this, depends upon the tenacity of error. (See 296:20; 569:26, ibid.)

Johnny: But the bottom line—and how wonderful to contemplate—is that Jesus did actually prove the overcoming of death and the grave to be a present possibility. And St. John and Mrs. Eddy both saw “a new heaven and a new earth.” Mrs. Eddy, like St. John, beheld what the eye cannot see, or she could not have discovered Science, reduced it to Christian Science, written the textbook, her other writings, and founded this Science in human consciousness.

Anna: Yes. She said, “Through human consciousness convince the mortal of his mistake.” “[The leaven of Truth] must destroy the entire mass of error, and so be eternally glorified in man’s spiritual freedom” (ibid. 327:27 & 118:11). Then the human consciousness becomes “that consciousness which God bestows.” And to a student she added one of her sagacious flashes of insight: “I speak to the whole of human consciousness, and if you do, everyone will hear you” (early Collectanea). “Any hypothesis which supposes life to be in matter is an educated belief.... As consciousness develops, this belief goes out, —yields to the reality of everlasting Life” (1910 ed. 489:8).

MRS. EDDY’S TEACHING AHEAD OF ITS TIME

Moderator: Mrs. Eddy urgently admonishes that because her “teaching is in advance of the age, we should not deny our need of its spiritual unfoldment” (ibid. 371:23).

Marie: Could you further explain why the teaching of Christian Science is in advance of the age?

Abraham: Because Christian Science teaches the nothingness of personality, the nothingness of a selfhood apart from God—the nothingness of human birth, of life and intelligence in matter. It teaches the total unreality of evil. “Evil is a supposititious lie.”

Moses: Certainly in Mrs. Eddy’s time there was also great resistance to Christian Science because a woman discovered it. I suspect that among the unenlightened this resistance is still much in evidence.

Moderator: Yes, that’s true, Moses, but “God is no respecter of persons.” What Jesus said Mrs. Eddy could also have said: namely, that the works he did we could do also, implying that what either one of them did we can do also. The only thing special about Jesus or Mrs. Eddy is that they did it better than any of us have thus far done it. As we stated previously, to say that either Jesus or Mrs. Eddy was especially chosen of God is to miss the whole point of her teaching. Since “God is no respecter of persons” Mrs. Eddy and Jesus were God-appointed in the same way that each one of us is “Godappointed”—to do what we are able to do.

JESUS THE GREAT EXEMPLAR

Tommy: Mrs. Eddy explains that it was Jesus’ interpretation of God [of Principle and its idea] that made him victorious over death and the grave; and as humanity awakens to the Science of being, it too will achieve what Jesus achieved. He restored the spiritual sense of man as immortal, supplanting the mortal sense with the immortal and divine.

This is why Mrs. Eddy states in the tenets of Christian Science that “we solemnly promise to watch, and pray for that Mind to be in us which was also in Christ Jesus” (1910 ed. 497:24). “He who dated the Christian era is the Ensample in Christian Science” (Manual, p. 41:1).

In an essay ascribed to Mrs. Eddy entitled, MESSIANIC REINCARNATION AN IMPOSSIBILITY, she states:

Jesus’ mission on earth was to show, by demonstration, that there is no corporeal personality, no sickness, no sin, no death.

According to Christian Science the word person means divinity, and not humanity. This Science teaches that there is absolutely no such thing as physical personality. The incarnation (or fleshly environment) of Jesus was intended to illustrate the process by which physicality (or so-called material personality) is diminished—that proportionately as mortal mind is spiritualized, physical personality decreases, until it finally disappears, as Jesus vanished in the ascension.

Jesus’ work was individual, and can never be repeated. His reappearing must be impersonal. His second coming must be as an idea, not as corporeality. He must present, not mind as incarnated in matter, or soul as circled in the flesh, but a realization of Life, Truth, and Love in their spiritual signification, as set forth in the Scriptures and in Science and Health.

The mother who believes she gives, or can give, birth to a babe whose career will be an improvement upon that of Jesus-or will even reproduce his —labors under a greater delusion than is found in the widely diffused doctrine concerning the second advent of Christ; because this implies that the infinite can be embodied in the finite, and that there can be a material reappearance of what Saint Paul called ‘the man Christ Jesus’; whereas the Saviour proved that his growth was a progress upward out of corporeality, into Spirit, not a retrogression downward, into the flesh.

No mortal man or woman ever will, or can, take Jesus’ place, or again fulfill his earthly mission. His work is already accomplished, and needs no duplication. What will be developed through Christian Science, and is now unfolding itself, is the purer idea and spiritual manifestation of the Christ character, in word and deed. The personal appearance of the Master was but once, and for all time.

The spiritually scientific phenomenon of individual being is the final outcome or result of that life more abundant which the Saviour gave to the world, in his demonstration of the unreality of what is called material personality, and his witness that the belief of any possible life, substance, and intelligence in or of matter is an illusion. He is simply mad who avers that a mortal and material man or woman is Deity, the divine Principle, or can be the divine idea. Such a blasphemous allegation, such a materialistic conjecture, such a misdirected imagination is anthropomorphic, and leads to downright atheism. (EOF p. 23)

When Mrs. Eddy discovered the power of Spirit to break the cords of matter, through a change in the mortal sense of things, she simultaneously discerned the last Adam as a quickening Spirit, and understood the meaning of the declaration of Holy Writ, “The first shall be last”—the living Soul shall be found a quickening Spirit; or, rather shall reflect the Life of the divine Arbiter. (See Un. 30:18.)

JESUS’ PROOFS MADE HIM THE “LAST ADAM”

Rookie: Mrs. Eddy speaks of “the last Adam represented by the Messiah, whose demonstration of God restored to mortals the lost sense of man’s perfection.” This, of course, was why he was our Example. Could we enlarge on that?

Danny: Jesus was “the last Adam” because he came as a fleshly personality—which was the only way he could have been recognized by mortals—he was therefore an Adam, having been born of a human mother. The reason he was “the last Adam,” was because he understood and proved that man is not the father of man; he understood and proved that he was Mind, God—“Jesus understood himself Soul”.... “Jesus regarded himself Principle” ... “Jesus held all that he was, God” ... “He established the proof that he was Christ and that Christ is God, the Soul and Life of man” (first ed. statements). Gordon Brown states:

What Jesus did was to solve from beginning to end the foremost human problem of Jehovistic anthropomorphism and, therefore, of animal magnetism. Jesus literally unmasked the mythology of God in the form of man and, through the Science of his own being replaced it with man in the form of God.

(Gordon Brown tape recording: Chapter V, Animal Magnetism Unmasked, Obtainable from Gordon and Estelle Brown, 2 Castle Mount, 40 Carlisle Road, Eastbourne, E. Sussex, BN20 7TD, England.)

Jesus proved that this false belief, that man is the creator of man, was the “murderer from the beginning,” the usurper of Mind’s prerogative.

Anna: Mrs. Eddy tells us it was “divine Science which ushered Jesus into human presence” (1910 ed. 325:27). Jesus unmasked the lie that we are mortals, and replaced that lie with the fact that we are Spirit, God; he proved it with his resurrection and ascension. Jesus had that Mind which “is its own great cause and effect” (Mis. 173:12); his victory over death and the grave proved it also to be our right Mind, since there is only one Mind. This made him “the last Adam” because, through his demonstration and proof, the lie that we are mortal instead of divine was uncovered and repudiated.

When Jesus reproduced his body after the crucifixion and burial, he proved he was Principle, Mind, or the divine “Us” of Genesis 1:26,-the “Us” or Life, Truth, and Love—that could say: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Mind is the power that formed the image he was able to present to the disciples after his resurrection. And Love admonishes us to accept as our Mind that same Mind that was Mind to Christ Jesus.

Jesus’ great example and Mary Baker Eddy’s explanation of it insures our ultimate understanding and acceptance of our divinity.

Grace: Charles Schwab, a great steel magnate, had a little sign on his desk: “Any man can learn to do anything that any other man has done if he will apply himself.” Have you ever known of anyone who all his life had striven toward a certain goal and who had in no measure attained it? At our present stage of growth, “work-work-work-watch and pray” is indicated. All progress has sprung from work. Work has laid the foundation of every success, of every victory. The work of preparation for mental receptivity stands behind great discoveries and revelations

CONSTANCY OF PURPOSE NECESSARY

Francy: Constancy of purpose and zeal are sometimes more important than ability. Much of the best work in the world has been that of dull people who have done their best.

Moderator: Amen! To this we could add from Shakespeare: “Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we often might win except for fearing to attempt.” We should do the thing we fear’ If we have a hard time getting started we ought to heed the words of Goethe: “If you think you can do it, begin it! Begin and the mind grows heated. Begin and the task is completed.” How often we have found that to be true. Trying is the touchstone to accomplishment. Someone has wisely said, “Progress is the mother of problems.” In working out the great problem of being, we do meet problems, but like Christ Jesus and Mrs. Eddy we too will come to the solution of every life-problem. This requires work.

Elsie: What about pleasure?

Bill: “Pleasure is no crime except when it strengthens the influence of bad inclinations or lessens the activities of virtue” (Mis. 362:30). Since the mind is dyed by the color of its leisure hours, the purpose of recreation should never be to merely amuse, or to become slaves to pleasure, but rather to enhance our usefulness, increase our mental fitness, spur our achievements. The study of Mary Baker Eddy’s books and the Bible will open men’s mind to new vistas of reality, vistas of man’s present divinity. It will strengthen spiritual and moral fiber as nothing else can, providing the study is an honest and sincere search for God, divine good’s ever-presence.

Moderator: That’s right, Bill. Right activity energizes, while inertia and apathy enervate. Mrs. Eddy told her students to avoid, i.e., handle apathy as though their lives depended on it. The dull senses intoxicated with pain or pleasure must be roused. Men and women are not stirred or inspired to seek their true spiritual God-being “by the hope of ease, pleasure, or recompense, or by the stress of the appetites and passions” (‘01 . 30:21).

Sally: Also, I would like to add we should not look to the future, but live only for the present hour and its specific work. Try not to think of the amount that must be accomplished, the difficulties, or the end to be attained. We should simply set ourselves diligently at the little task at our elbow and let that be sufficient to concentrate on. A patient, humble temper can manage to gather blessings which the aspiring overlook and which are marred by the fretful.

Moderator: Yes, a patient humble temper will help unburden the load with which regretting the past and fearing the future encumbers us. We need all the time we can get in this earthly existence to appreciate what is warm with life, and immediately around us. We should bear in Mind our Leader’s words: “The real Christian Scientist is constantly accentuating harmony in word and deed, mentally and orally” (Mis. 206:19). Naturally this doesn’t mean that we close our eyes to evil, but rather that our whole heart is filled with unconditional love.

A wise physician said to his patient: “I have been practicing medicine for 30 years, and I have prescribed many things. But in the long run I have learned that for most of what ails the human creature the best medicine is love.” When asked: “What if it doesn’t work?” he answered “Double the dose.”

Tommy: A favorite passage of mine is Mrs. Eddy’s statement:

How good and pleasant a thing it is to seek not so much thine own as another’s good, to sow by the wayside for the way-weary, and trust Love’s recompense of love.”(No. 3:21).

Kathleen: Getting back to “pleasure is no crime except when it strengthens the influence of bad inclinations,” a Chinese proverb says “One should be just as careful in choosing one’s pleasures as in avoiding calamities.” This is true because as Bill affirmed, the mind is dyed by the color of its leisure hours. Also, when we remember that Love’s labor is never lost we should bend every effort to acquaint ourselves with our Leader’s stupendous discovery that we are divine God-beings here and now.

Sally: Through Mrs. Eddy’s lifework Truth is revealed; it needs now only to be practiced. (See 1910 ed. 174:20.) But that requires work, watching, praying.

When Mrs. Eddy explained that “human beings are physically mortal, but spiritually immortal” (Un. 37:17), she gave the reason why we too shall all make our exit from the flesh. And she continues: “The evil accompanying physical personality is illusive, and mortal; but the good attendant upon spiritual individuality is immortal. Existing here and now, this unseen individuality is real and eternal.” But only working scientifically, watching, praying, will reveal it.

Again, Mrs. Eddy counseled us to become acquainted with this real unseen individuality. She urged:

“Know thyself!”...Note well the falsity of this mortal self! Behold its vileness, and remember this poverty-stricken “stranger that is within thy gates.” [Animal magnetism wants our attention riveted on the mortal self and diverted from the true spiritual divine self.] Cleanse every stain from this wanderer’s soiled garments, wipe the dust from his feet and the tears from his eyes, that you may behold the real man, the fellow-saint of a holy household. (Ret. 86:8).

Anna: The statement that “Human beings are physically mortal, but spiritually immortal” tells us humanity is not at all the same thing as the mortal concept. In fact the reason for both the First and Second Advent is to show us reality—to reveal the difference between humanity and the mortal concept. In the First Advent Jesus exemplified and made clear the humanity of divinity—how God (infinite good, Love) “sent His only begotten Son” to help humanity free itself of illusions. In the Second Advent, Mary Baker Eddy discovered the Science that lay behind Jesus’ works, and wrote the textbook which explained the divinity of humanity.

Moderator: Yes, Anna, Christian Science has come, as prophesied, in order that all mortals can “be brought back through great tribulation, to be renamed in Christian Science” (1910 ed. 309:20).

Rookie: Does it have to be “through great tribulation?”

Moderator: Mrs. Eddy answers candidly

P. 218:29: If we part not with the imaginary joys of personal sense, appetites, passions, malice, pride, etc., at the suggestions of Science, we must at some future time suffer from these sufficiently to be glad to relinquish them ...pain or pleasure of the body is not a reality, it is belief only, and...at some time we must learn this. It is not through enjoyment, but suffering, we learn the error of Life in matter, and outside of suffering it can be learned only of Science; which do you choose for a teacher?... The loving discipline our Father [Principle] gives to teach us the Science of being, in the nothingness of material things, is the schoolmaster that leads us to Christ, Truth.

The only way we learn anything in Christian Science is through false beliefs falling away as the true idea is revealed.

In the 2nd edition Mrs. Eddy solemnly urges:

P. 120:32: Let us regain our God-being.

In People’s Idea of God she insists:

Even the pangs of death disappear, accordingly as the understanding that we are spiritual beings here reappears.(P. 1).

Margie: Mrs. Eddy is reported to have announced that “Anything divinely true is humanly demonstrable; but is not humanly true until humanly demonstrated” (early Collectanea). The divine is expressed as the true human, but not as a flesh-and-bones matter body.

Kathleen: While Jesus and Mrs. Eddy solved for themselves the problem of mortal mind’s impositions or inflictions—mortal mind’s tricks, that result in all the discord that flesh is heir to—they were both totally motivated by love for suffering humanity. Of Jesus, Mrs. Eddy writes, it would be “a species of infidelity to believe that so great a work as the Messiah’s was done for himself or for God, who needed no help from Jesus’ example to preserve the eternal harmony” (1910 ed. 494:5). This statement is also true of Mrs. Eddy. But mortals did need this help.

Francy: A belief of personal magnanimity was never the principle governing the careers of Jesus and Mary Baker Eddy; rather it was the indivisible divine Principle, Love, manifesting itself as Christ Jesus and Christian Science. This divine Principle enforced obedience to itself—to Principle which is universal and impartial.

Margie: I think the greatness of Mrs. Eddy was that she was not content with her own healing. That was only the beginning of her search to find and understand the Science of Mind-healing so that she could give it to all mankind.

The net result of Jesus’ earthly career was the sublime example he set in demonstrating that it is possible to work out of the impositions—the inflictions—of animal magnetism; that it is possible for mortals to awaken from the deep hypnotic sleep imposed on Adam by the Lord God [Jehovah]. JESUS DID IT!

THE ADAM DREAM OF INCOMPLETENESS

EIsie: What, specifically, was suggested to Adam during the hypnotic sleep imposed upon his consciousness?

Moses: It was the belief of sex. In this allegory Adam stands for error. He was made to believe a lie; the lie that he had broken away from his true identity as Spirit in which he was whole, undivided from his womanhood, and that he was now “revolving in an orbit of his own” (ibid. 522:9). In his spiritual original state he was complete, since “God is individual Mind”; infinite good was therefore his consciousness. Remember, “the eternal Elohim includes the forever universe” (ibid. 515:16), and what the eternal Elohim images forth is as total, entire, and perfect as itself; it never images itself forth as manhood divided from womanhood.

Rookie: Could you explain further how man was robbed of dominion and “sovereign power”—completeness?

Moses: I believe Mrs. Eddy answered that in Science of Man. She states:

God never created [error], but all that worketh a lie was made after the creation of God, and fashioned after this sort, a belief of pleasure in matter. This led to sexual intercourse, and this belief of man and woman mingling brought forth another belief, and this was that man was a creator, and this error brought sin, sickness and death....Belief has its own images of thought and calls them identities, but they are not. An idea of God is something embraced in God. A belief has no identity. (EOF p. 209).

Danny: The deep sleep which the Lord God [Jehovah] caused to fall upon Adam was the parent of all human discord-the parent of all that which robbed man of dominion and power, “so that man becomes the most absolutely weak and inharmonious creature in the universe.” Science teaches us we are Mind, Spirit, Soul, and therefore all creation is divinely mental and spiritual-it is “the outgrowth, the emanation of [Mind’s] infinite self-containment and immortal wisdom” (1910 ed. 519:5). Science teaches, “Mind is its own great cause and effect” (Mis. 173:12). That Mind is our Mind. There is only one Mind. There is no other mind, in actuality, that can create a mortal, physical body which is nothing more than “a sensuous human concept,” an illusion, like a sleep dream from which we must awaken ourselves.

Bill: As the ability to do abstract or conceptual thinking and analysis increases, and the standpoint of the first edition that “we are Spirit, and Spirit is God,” is more generally understood and accepted, humanity will experience a tremendous change of viewpoint, with potentially unlimited power for good in its wake.

Grace: Our urgent work is to get self out of the way; then the only operator is divine Principle; this puts the government where, in actuality, it is.

Mrs. Eddy gave her students the following little exercise to help them develop spiritual sense:

Just go alone; close your eyes, and in the depths of your consciousness say over and over again: “I am, I am, I am, I am.” Your whole being will be filled with the sense of the power to overcome, the power to accomplish, the power to do all things (DCC. p. 51).

“The power to overcome, the power to accomplish, the power to do all things has come to us through Mrs. Eddy’s discovery of Science. The power was always there, but until Mrs. Eddy’s teaching explained the Word, Christ, and Christianity, humanity did not know of this power.

When Mrs. Eddy told her students to declare, from the depths of their consciousness, “I am, I am,” she was in effect telling them that they must reckon themselves Principle, as she makes clear in the first edition. When understanding reigns, we find we are Principle. This realization fills our whole being with the sense of power to overcome, the power to accomplish, to do all things. When we realize we are Principle, we don’t pray to the Principle and ask it to help us, anymore than we stand in front of the blackboard and implore the principle of mathematics to help us, or to solve the problem for us.

We must remember that each one expresses, in a unique way, the whole of God, Mind, Principle. Every idea is as infinite and all-powerful as the whole, as Principle itself. There can never be a time or place when Principle, Mind, Spirit, could exist without its idea since Principle and its idea is one. This is why Jesus could say: “I and the Father [Principle] are one ...He that hath seen me hath seen the Father [infinite good].”

We do not understand Mrs. Eddy’s teaching unless we see that one infinite Principle can express itself only as one infinite, indivisible idea. This is the reason you are always “alone with your own being and with the reality of things” and why you therefore “have sovereign power to think and act rightly,” as she tells us in Prose Works.

Mrs. Eddy in her 1901 poem wrote: “Thou God-crowned, patient century, Thine hour hath come!” and in the textbook she wrote: “the earth will help the woman.” (Woman is a symbol for Science which includes manhood, which, in turn, is a symbol for Christianity.) What did Mrs. Eddy envision for the end of this century? Did she foresee there would be a general glimpsing of our oneness with Principle bringing with it “the sense of power to overcome, the power to accomplish, the power to do all things”? Did she foresee a general glimpsing of the great truth that the “woman” (Science) is the real YOU? Did she foresee a general glimpsing by humanity that the real you is actually that “angel standing in the sun” (Rev. 19:17)-(see Glossary definition of “sun.”)

That “angel standing in the sun” is you, and is telling you that you include every manhood and womanhood quality of divine Principle. And when you recognize that you are the “I am,” the Principle, having every manhood and every womanhood quality, “your whole being will be filled with the sense of the power to overcome, the power to accomplish, the power to do all things.” Woman (Science) is a symbol for the truth that each idea is the whole of infinite good expressed in a unique way.

Anna: I would like to add that Adam is a belief, not a believer. The Adam belief is the belief that something can be created out of nothing. “The name Adam represents the false supposition that Life...has beginning and end; that the infinite enters the finite....” (1910 ed. 580:21). Mortals are the Adam dreamers. The basic difference between the first and second records of creation is that in the first record everything proceeds out of the one Mind, so it is the unfoldment of the divine Mind; whereas the Adam allegory starts with lack. It has to first create an entity which can then experience good and evil. From this false premise of nothingness—becoming—something, all errors get worse and worse.

THE FOLLY OF GIVING IDENTITY TO SIN

Moderator: Would any one like to add to this exposure of the “three-in-one of error: the world, the flesh, and the devil”?

Bill: It seems the whole of error rests on the assumption that there is another power of being other than the one power of Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love and its expression, operating through the four-fold calculus of Word, Christ, Christianity and Science.

Florence: Mrs. Eddy tells us:

Sin was, and is, the lying supposition that life, substance, and intelligence are both material and spiritual [and are in the so-called matter body]....The first iniquitous manifestation of sin was a finity. The finite was self-arrayed against the infinite, the mortal against immortality, and a sinner was the antipode of God ....

The sinner created neither himself nor sin, but sin created the sinner; that is, error made its man mortal, and this mortal was the image and likeness of evil, not of good. Therefore the lie was, and is, collective as well as individual. It was in no way contingent upon Adam’s thought, but supposititiously self-created. (Ret. 67:6-23).

Jesus called this lying supposition that life and intelligence are in a matter body “a murderer from the beginning.”

Marie: The first record of creation shows the spontaneous self-manifestation of the infinite One. There is no struggle to create. The divine Principle natively manifests its own infinitude. Then, to reinforce that first record we have the upside-down second record to show what being is not.

Moderator: That’s right, Marie. If we don’t attribute identity to error we are not left with a state of lack that has to be changed. We must know there isn’t a “we” that has to be changed. Attributing identity to error makes it harder to expel; therefore it’s important to remember that the Adam-dream account only tells us what is not; knowing this, takes the starch out of the theological personification of error, which is what the Adam story is.

Tommy: Yes, we must see there is no identity to anything except as it is identified with Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love. The whole point of her system is that it progressively enlarges the understanding that the “I” is Principle and not person.

Margie: And because Christian Science is a system that can be learned by anyone who is interested and dedicated, Mrs. Eddy wrote:

If the Bible and my work Science and Health had their rightful place in schools of learning, they would revolutionize the world by advancing the kingdom of Christ. [And she added:] It requires sacrifice, struggle, prayer, and watchfulness to understand what these volumes teach, because they involve divine Science, with fixed Principle, a given rule, and unmistakable proof. (No. 33:5).

Bessie: A monumental amount of dedicated study has gone into Mary Baker Eddy’s textbook since Mr. Doorly, in 1937, discovered in it “the system she denominated Christian Science.” This was a discovery Mrs. Eddy knew the student would make in due time; and this better understanding of the system has made a good start in thinning out the belief of persons and material personality.

Danny: The theological interpretation of the Adam creation depicting man as physical, and “dependent upon his physical organization—is the Pandora box from which all [evil]” has sprung. In this Adam-dream, matter takes divine power into its own hands and through “paganism and lust” claims to be a creator. (See 1910 ed. 170:28-171:3.) In this dream state “man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble” (Job 14: 1). But there are signs all around us that the illusive nature of matter is being discerned, at least by the world’s leading physicists who are glimpsing Mrs. Eddy’s point of view and gradually coming into line with it. In due time what they are seeing will become common knowledge just as the “round-earth theory” once held by only a very few has today become common knowledge.

HER FAITH IN THE IMMORTALITY OF HER TEACHING

Florence: Mrs. Eddy had divine and absolute faith in the immortality of her teaching for the simple reason that God had dictated it. Lulu Blackman recorded:

Mrs. Eddy’s faith in the correctness of her interpretation of divine Science, when all the world doubted, transcended human belief and revealed [in the words of Science and Health, 209:31] a “conscious, constant capacity to understand God.”

Mrs. Eddy spoke to the whole human consciousness, and all true consciousness heard her. “When God speaks, God hears.”

As our next reference teaches, it is only the belief of personal sense that shuts out the communications of Soul:

P. 129:30: But to those buried in the belief of Life in matter and insisting that we see alone with eyes, and hear with ears, and feel through nerves, [Jesus] said, “Having eyes ye see not, and ears ye hear not, that ye might understand and be converted and I might heal you.” Their belief of personal sense [of life and mind in matter] shut out the communications of Soul; hence his saying, “Ye cannot serve two masters.”

Only when we are not “serving two masters” are we whole, undivided from God and in communication with Soul.

SOUL REVIEWED

Marie: The synonym Soul has been explained before, but since it is used so often in this first edition could we review once more at this point what Soul is, does, and deals with?

Moderator: Certainly. Grace, would you tell us how Mrs. Eddy uses Soul, particularly in our current textbook?

Grace: First, since there is only one God, one Soul, there cannot be many souls. The first edition tells us “we are Soul.” Therefore we are imbued with all Soul’s characteristics.

In her writings, Mrs. Eddy characterizes the synonym Soul as spiritual understanding and spiritual sense. In the human, Soul-sense is manifested as willingness to reform, to change, to be translated to ever higher levels of thought. Soul is further characterized as having that transforming power necessary to handle, to master, erroneous situations and translate them back into line with Soul’s divine incorporeal self. Soul enforces the changes necessary to bring human character in line with the divine character of Soul.

Soul bestows unchanging identity on everything Mind creates and which Spirit understands to be the only reality.

Other characteristics that Mrs. Eddy uses to bring out the nature of Soul are: balance, bliss, beauty, capacity, constancy, definiteness, freedom, identity, joy, resurrection; Soul rebukes, reforms and reverses error; Soul is safety; it satisfies, is sinlessness, tangible, unconfined.

Abraham: Our work is to accept that we are Soul and have the unchangeable, sinless nature of Soul. Soul, spiritual sense, manifests itself as man’s Soul infinitely individualized but always remaining the whole of Soul. Soul is all-powerful not only in Soul’s realm but also in the realm of physical sense testimony, where it translates the false testimony of the physical senses back into spiritual sense where all is always intact.

Like only sees like; that’s why we have to learn the synonyms and the ideas constituting them; then God sees God, Mind sees Mind, Spirit sees Spirit, Soul sees Soul, etc.

Moderator: Thank you, Grace and Abraham. Would you like to add something, Margie?

Margie: Later in this first edition Mrs. Eddy explains that man is the body of God, namely: man “epitomizes the universe and is the body of God.”

Anna: This would be true since “God’s laws, and their intelligent and harmonious action, constitute [man’s] individuality in the Science of Soul” (No. 11:5).

Margie: Yes. This thought-body of God-meaning “God’s laws and their harmonious and intelligent action”—is not divided. When you look into the mirror you see a whole image; it is not divided. Generic man is God; it is that state where no division exists. Generic man means that state where each reflects the undivided whole. Generic man, as stated previously, is another name for the coincidence of the divine Principle and the divine idea. For this reason Mrs. Eddy could write not only: “the Christian Scientist is alone with his own being and with the reality of things” (‘01. 20:7), but also that “ you,” as the Christian Scientist, “possess sovereign power to think and act rightly” (Pul. 3:7).

Tommy: Even the sleep dream partially illustrates this aloneness, in that you are always alone with all you are aware of in the dream. You dream you are at a crowded convention. Each attendee has his own personality as he expresses his opinion. But when you wake up you realize it was only your mind that was involved.

Sally: Since “God is individual Mind” (Mis. 101:31) it would logically follow that you, that 1, reflect the undivided whole. The quotation continues by explaining: “this one Mind and [its] individuality comprise the elements of all forms and individualities, and prophesy the nature and stature of Christ, the ideal man.” With God as individual Mind—as the only Mind of man— “we can grasp even the infinite idea.” That is, we can learn our true identity as Spirit which is wholly good, changelessly satisfied and serene. We can learn this from Jesus’ demonstration, as our next reference will show:

P. 133:16: The demonstration Jesus gave of God, did for the world more than a problem wrought and explained in mathematics does for the learner; it taught the human race how to demonstrate aright the Principle that is God; and if this demonstration had been understood, man would have reached the example of Jesus, and solved his being harmoniously ere this.. ..

The personal belief of God that holds Spirit person instead of Principle, making Soul intelligent matter...possessing all the tyranny and passion a belief of Life in matter manifests, was the very error that crucified Jesus; and that today is shutting out the reign of harmony. Jesus knew there was but one God, hence that man’s Intelligence was God, and not man, Principle and not person; therefore said he, “I and the Father are one;” and because of this scientific statement, and the demonstration it brought with it, the rulers cried out, “Crucify him, he maketh himself as God,” “and what further witness need we against him.”

THE STRUGGLE WITH SIN’S CLAIM TO IDENTITY

Jessie: Our whole struggle is to rid ourselves of error, of the veil hiding the truth that man’s only intelligence is God.

Anna: We must get rid of any sense of “struggle”; we must not attribute identity to error since that enhances its tenacity. Mrs. Eddy says when she saw that because Life (God) lived, she lived, she “awoke from the dream of Spirit in the flesh so far as to take the side of Spirit, and [strove] to cease [her] warfare” (Mis. 180: 1). Also, she says:

The first spontaneous motion of Truth and Love, acting through Christian Science on my roused consciousness, banished at once and forever the fundamental error of faith in things material; for this trust is the unseen sin, the unknown foe—-the heart’s untamed desire which [breaks] the divine commandments. (Ret. 31:13).

Moses: Alice Orgain illuminates this struggle to set man free, in her explanation concerning the change Mrs. Eddy made in the first stanza of her Poem, Christ and Christmas: from “O’er the dark night of chaos shone one lone brave star,” to “O’er the grim night.”

Webster defines “dark” as “destitute of moral or spiritual light,” and defines “grim” as: “savage, merciless, fierce, and relentless.” Thus “dark” suggests the chaos and “darkness ..upon the face of the deep” in the second verse of the first chapter of Genesis before “the Spirit of God moved upon” it.

On the other hand, “grim” describes the struggle of light with darkness in the human consciousness, after God said, “Let there be light,” (Gen. 1:3). This was the first divine command given to the human consciousness, and it started the grim struggle of manhood [meaning humanity] to objectively demonstrate the light of Womanhood, which existed subjectively before the command was necessary.

Thus when Mrs. Eddy had previously used “O’er the dark night” instead of “O’er the grim night” Woman did not give credit to the struggle of manhood, typing Christianity, that changed darkness into grim struggle. In confirmation of the significance of this change, Mrs. Eddy simultaneously added the “Glossary” of Christ and Christmas containing the scriptural texts for the pictures—the Scriptures recording the struggle of manhood. (See Angelic Overtures of “Christ and Christmas,” p. 13.)

Moderator: Thank you, Moses. That explanation graphically summarizes this Chapter 11 of the first edition—the struggle to lay down the mortal, the misconceptions that mask reality.

Francy: Regarding the “struggle,” when I asked our neighbor’s 4-year-old who attends nursery school, what he did in school, he answered promptly, “I fight and take tests.”

“WE MUST TELL THE TRUTH CONCERNING SIN”

Moderator: Note how in this next reference she again explains that “all the discords of earth proceed from false conceptions of God and man”:

P. 136:10: The mind of Intelligence understands and never believes, and the body of Intelligence is spiritual not material, idea and not substance;...it is the reflex shadow of Soul, even man that is “the image and likeness of God;” what besides this we name man, is but a belief and error, dust to dust. Hereby we learn a lie is all the satan there is, and marking its footsteps we gain this proof. all the discords of earth proceed from false conceptions of God and man....We must tell the Truth concerning sin and sinners, because of the moral necessity not to cover iniquity.

Grace: She exposes satan as nothing more than a lie. But the more Truth you bring the more error is stirred by it, until the final conquest on the side of right. Only through the self-renunciation of all that constitutes a so-called material man can spiritual identity be achieved.

NEED FOR WORK INPUT, FOR TRUTH TO WORK

Moderator: In our next reference Mrs. Eddy indicates Jesus was no different from us except in his fuller understanding of reality:

P. 137:20: He who was God, and not in man, was “no respecter of persons,” therefore claimed no personal worship. [139:8 states:] They to whom he had given the highest proofs of the Science of being, misinterpreted them, and said deridingly, “He maketh himself as God.”

When Mrs. Eddy here and elsewhere in the text states: “He who was God,” she is, of course, speaking from an entirely different point of view than other religions which teach erroneously that the human personality, named Jesus, was God and that the Virgin Mary was therefore “the mother of God.” Mrs. Eddy knew it was the Mind of Jesus that was God. He demonstrated the Mind of Christ, the Mind of God. “Jesus” she says, was “the highest human corporeal concept of the divine idea....” (1910 ed. 589:16).

The human Jesus was an expression of the divine Principle, just as 2 X 2 = 4 is an expression of the mathematical principle.

The “I” and its idea is one. In Science, Principle includes its idea. The “I” doesn’t belong to somebody or something up in the clouds, something apart from our consciousness that has to be entreated or prayed to. This “I” is your true divine “I”; it is my “I,” that I am.

Margie: Mrs. Eddy urged her household: “Realize for yourself that Love and Truth and action on your part—for Truth does not work for you unless you work—will give you the victory” (early Collectanea).

In Miscellaneous Writings she tells us: “The hour has struck for Christian Scientists to do their own work.” We are asked: “Who would stand before a blackboard, and pray the principle of mathematics to solve the problem?” (1910 ed. 3:4).

Abraham: The odyssey of man through time shows that “as you work the ages win.” Humanity must work out of this dream of life in matter. Time is neutral and doesn’t change, but courage, intelligence, God-inspired leadership, and the willingness to work hard enough, do bring change and progress. Mrs. Eddy reminds us that “the conscientious are successful”—they work on through evil and through good report to the achievement of good. We must not flee before the enemy. Remember:

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgement seat;

Oh be swift my Soul to answer Him, be jubilant my feet.

-Julia Ward Howe.

Moderator: “Obey this call. Go, if you must, to the dungeon or the scaffold, but take not back the words of Truth” was Mrs. Eddy’s rallying cry in her Chicago Address. Stand up for Principle.

As students work from their home summits (divine consciousness) they are lights that cannot be hid; and the time to work is now. Striking for higher ground may bring persecution and pain, but the faithful are strong enough to overcome the pain and to keep moving onward.

We don’t grow unless we do “work.” Too many of us are like the little 5-year-old who when urged by the student-teacher to put on his own rubbers, replied majestically: “Of course I can put on my rubbers, but a student teacher’s job is to help little boys put on their rubbers, isn’t it?”

Marie: In more serious vein, I have often been helped by Mrs. Eddy’s counsel: “Never ask another to help you; as sure as you do you cripple yourself.” At another time, regarding a shock or disappointment, she said: “Unless you go right on as though nothing had happened, you are not watching with God” (Carpenter Collection). Even if you fall down and break a leg, get right up and declare: “The experience did me good!” she is reported to have told a student. This counsel has helped me many times to overcome a seeming hurt or hardship.

Anna: Referring to our last first edition reference: “He maketh himself as God,” that is exactly what Jesus did do and demonstrate, but not in their meaning. He said: “I and the Father are one ...he that hath seen me, hath seen the Father.” He was referring to his God-consciousness, his Christ-Mind.

Our next reference shows how Jesus, our divine Exemplar, worked on through the crossfire and cross-winds his teaching evoked, and in spite of his knowledge that Gethsemane and the cross awaited him he never swerved from his goal to “establish the proof that he was Christ and Christ is God. Think of the spiritual dominion this involved! On the more mundane level, as Samuel Johnson once remarked, “A man doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor, is not much disposed to abstracted meditation or remote inquiries.” But here was Jesus faced with death on the cross and the cruel treatment that led up to it! Yet he was able to abide in the calculus of Spirit and Truth, able to keep his divine composure! With the exception of the lone disciple and a few women, he was deserted, forsaken by all whom he had blessed. And yet, what supreme command over mortal mind suggestions he exercised! Truly he showed mortals the power of God, of the Christ Mind, that he claimed as his Mind. We stand in awe before such dominion!

P. 125:30 We must understand God to demonstrate Truth. Jesus of Nazareth, the fittest teacher of mankind, possessed his understanding; but the scorning Rabbi, the rival Pharisee, Gethsemane and the cross were ready to devour him .

Our Master, meekly, and yet as a victor, bore the mockery of his self-conscious God-being...and established the proof that he was Christ, and that Christ is God, the Soul and Life of man.

THE ON—GOING EXAMPLE OF MRS. EDDY’S FORTITUDE

Moderator: What other subjects are prominently featured in this part of her Chapter II?

Rocky: There continues to be much concerning the treatment Jesus received. For instance:

P. 131:15: Anomalous though it seems, I have no doubt that Jesus was shunned, and deemed a bad man at the period of his public labors, by all save the few unpretentious ones whose Christianity enabled them to understand him. This was the cup drank to the dregs by our Master; he also spoke of those who followed him, drinking this very cup; which must indeed be the case if they are in advance of the public sentiment.

Bill: We know Mrs. Eddy did, indeed, “drink this very cup”; that, in fact, she suffered from the dismal withering blasts of ingratitude and disdain meted out by apostasizing students as well as by other harsh critics of her day. The Christian Science Journal of July, 1899, contains a poem which has a deeply moving effect on the reader when he knows the painful circumstances, the poignant regrets for the loss of promising students, which led to its writing.

The poem is entitled, Signs of the Heart.

It was a desperate, crucial hour for the Cause, characterized by the open working of animal magnetism. Disloyal students were sparing no effort in their attempts to discredit Mrs. Eddy as Leader, and to destroy her holy mission.

One night as she was waiting on God for a message concerning this \agonizing development, she took up a sheaf of papers to look through them. She placed the rubber band that bound them, on her arm. Later, as she was pacing the floor in prayer, she tossed the rubber band on a chest of drawers. It fell in the shape of a heart. Always able to find “sermons in stones,” and the smile of God in a rose, this shape of a heart held great significance and comfort for her. It symbolized the great heart of God, “the ever-presence of ministering Love” (1910 ed. 567:2). It told her God had guided her to a right decision; and gave her the assurance that His plan would prevail.

Greatly comforted, she sat down and wrote the following poem, closing it with a prayer that the “barren brood” might be awakened to the joy of each finding his own God-appointed place and that the dove of peace might rest and abide with all:

SIGNS OF THE HEART

Come to me, joys of heaven!

Breathe through the summer air

A balm—the long-lost leaven

Dissolving death, despair!

0 little heart,

To me thou art

A sign that never can depart.

Come to me, peace on earth!

From out life’s billowy seas,—

A wave of welcome birth,—

The Life that lives in Thee!

This heart of Thine,

Is all I need to comfort mine.

Come when the shadows fall,

And night grows deeply dark;

The barren brood, 0 call

With song of morning lark;

And from above,

Dear heart of Love,

Send us thy white-winged dove.

That Mrs. Eddy’s prayer was answered is attested by a letter from the First Members of The Mother Church appearing in the same issue of The Christian Science Journal in which the poem appeared. Their letter expressed boundless love, profound gratitude, and their “deepest assurances of unflinching desire and purpose to support you in every way possible, in this, your hour of seeming persecution, but of great blessing.”

Mrs. Eddy’s subjective realization of ever-present Love, in dealing with the problem, had lifted her into the realm of Spirit’s reality and allness, where harmony reigned. The letter from her loyal students, the “remnant,” published in the Journal, was her proof.

Sally: We just read Mrs. Eddy’s statement: “I have no doubt that Jesus was shunned, and deemed a bad man at the period of his public labors.”

We have seen that this harsh lot also befell Mrs. Eddy. The Nadia Swartz Williams Reminiscences clues us in on the unkind sentiment with which Mrs. Eddy was at times regarded: Nadia Swartz Williams, a young Russian girl who spoke no English, was greatly attracted to Mrs. Eddy, her neighbor, when the two met over their back fence. Nadia’s aunt, however, had a different view. When told of the budding friendship, she denounced Mrs. Eddy, saying she was a “wicked woman, not right in the head,” and Nadia should in the future avoid her.

Bancroft and others have testified to the hatred and malice directed toward Mrs. Eddy and of the disquieting rumors that were manufactured and passed around freely when Mrs. Eddy was trying to establish Christian Science in Lynn.

Abraham: These denigrating attacks are continuing today, as Mrs. Eddy foresaw they would when she penned (and note it is directed to future adherents): “What if the old dragon should send forth a new flood to drown the Christ-idea? He can neither drown your voice.. nor again sink the world into the deep waters of chaos and old night” (1910 ed. 570:18).

The Science she was teaching held a blessing for each member of the human race, but because it reversed every position of personal sense, of mortal mind, it was, and still is, “met with the malignancy of error in return for Love shedding its blessings unsparingly on all.” Nevertheless Mrs. Eddy patiently persisted in pouring out to the world her hard-won treasures, revealing to mortals that everything lives only to bless everything else.

THE VALUE OF SORROW

The next reference from the first edition deals with recompense and reward:

P. 132:41: Earth has no recompense for such a life; personal sense can neither give nor receive this reward; the understanding of God is its only recompense that lifts being above mortal discord and gives it immortal harmony.

Tommy: Knowing that “tear or triumph harms,” and that there was a blessing in each cruel blow, Mrs. Eddy met every onslaught with the prayer: “0, make me glad for every scalding tear.” She waited, and loved more for every hate. Undeviatingly she returned blessing for cursing.

In the first issue of The Christian Science Journal she wrote: “As bees can breed no poison, though they suck the deadliest juice— so the noble mind, though forced to drain the cup of misery, can yield but generous thoughts and noble deeds.”

On page 261:9 of the first edition of Science and Health she wrote, “Every agony of mortal man wafts him onward over the billows until error is finally destroyed, and ‘there is no more sea.”‘ Mrs. Eddy knew “it was the set of the sail” and not the storms of life that decide the harbor, the goal. It is necessary to have an aim—to set our sail for Truth and Love. When a mortal doesn’t know what harbor he is making for no wind is the right wind. We must begin to grasp the substance instead of the shadow. By constant self-discipline, and allowing God to control, the human self is evangelized. This is the new birth, the travail of error before it is self-destroyed, and man is born of Spirit and not matter.”

Grace: Mrs. Eddy recognized the value of experiences. The answer to the question: “Canst thou by searching find out God?” is “No.” It seems to take disappointments and ceaseless woes to turn us to divine Love. Thus we learn “sorrow only comes to stretch out places in the heart for joy;” and our gloom has only been “the shadow of God’s right hand outstretched caressingly” beckoning us to come up higher.

Mrs. Eddy could therefore announce triumphantly:

P. 271:7: The harmonious and immortal heavens, earth, and man will be revealed and understood when Science shall take the place of personal sense and error yield to Truth. The sharp experiences of earth, and the tender wisdom that takes away idols, help to hasten this hour, and to destroy the belief of happiness in personal sense....[then p. 262:8:1 The spiritual understanding of Life embraces neither sensuous formation nor conditions of matter....[243:2:] Birth, decay and death are a personal sense of things, not [Spirit’s] idea; man and the universe are complete and eternal in Intelligence, and nothing can exist [apart] from that.

PROGRESSIVE DEMATERIALIZATION OF BEING

Moderator: What is the important lesson here? What do we gain by being patient under the rod—under “the sharp experiences and the tender wisdom that takes away idols”?

Danny: She has already made it clear that:

Understanding Life exempt from mortality, and no sensation or Intelligence in the body is the ultimatum of being, the way, the Truth and Life, that points out the footsteps of Science. (256:10).

With “no sensation... in the body,” the last enemy, human birth, would be terminated. She has also explained that man originating in God never fell into sin. The so-called mortal man that is sinning, sick, and dying, resulting from the sex belief, is not the true and real man, but is, instead, a dream of Life and Intelligence in matter, ‘dust to dust,’ nothingness. The belief that there is sensation in the body, that there is life and intelligence in the body—this, she says, “was the original sin.” It was the lie that must be detected:

To put down the claim of sin, you must detect it, remove the mask, point out the illusion, and thus get the victory over sin and so prove its unreality. (1910 ed. 447:24).

By demonstration Mrs. Eddy proved in countless ways that behind the substanceless facade or mask called animal magnetism, was never anything but divine Love.

Bill: That’s really what she is saying in the reference we come to next in this first edition, and note again what she says the only devil is:

P. 135:7: The personal belief that man is a separate mind from God, and that this mind comprehends, feels, and exists, an entity within the cranium, and sins, and suffers, ad libitum, is the only personal devil there is, and the one we should begin to cast out.

Abraham: We cannot demonstrate the power of God until we discover that our true Mind is that power.

Elsie: When we learn in Science that all consciousness is Mind, why do we look outside of this Mind that is our true Mind, our own consciousness, for anything?

Moses: Because we don’t yet fully understand. But Mrs. Eddy makes the encouraging statement that “we shall ultimately prove this Science to individual consciousness” (29:21).

History tells us of various conceptions through which human thought has passed, and shows that with each successive age and stage there has been more and further dematerialization, until with the Advent of the Second Coming of the Christ, namely, the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, there has been a consummate dematerialization of being. This will ultimately lead to complete individual understanding.

Tommy: Once the understanding reigns that we are Soul and not body, that we don’t even have a matter body, nothing can touch us. “When we are Spirit,” Mrs. Eddy says, Spirit will express itself in a spiritual body of ideas.

Abraham: Mrs. Eddy understood and claimed God as her Mind, and we must do the same—must claim God, infinite good, as our Mind, as the Principle working in our consciousness. Like Jesus, Mrs. Eddy saw this kingdom of heaven within; saw this Mind-power as a practical, ever-active living Principle to be utilized.

She penetrated the veil of illusions and counseled: The way to break the shackles of fear and every false belief is “to pour in truth through flood-tides of Love,” since “Christian perfection is won on no other basis” (1910 ed. 201:17). She specifies Christian because “Christian Science may absorb the attention of sage and philosopher, but the Christian alone can fathom it” (ibid. 556:13).

Bessie: Why can the Christian alone fathom it?

Margie: Because the true “Christian” expresses love, and is the expression of Love. And Love divine is what it is all about.

THE HEALING LOVE THAT CASTS OUT FEAR AND HATE

Bessie: When will we begin to heal more quickly— more spontaneously?

Margie: Writing to a student, Mrs. Eddy said comfortingly, “The healing will grow more easy and be more immediate as you realize that God, good, is all, and good is Love. You must gain Love, and lose the false sense called love. You must feel Love that never faileth—that perfect sense of divine power that makes healing no longer power but grace. Then you will have the Love that casts out fear, and when fear is gone, doubt is gone and your work is done. Why? because it never was undone” (DCC p. 127).

Johnny: Richard M. Moss, M.D. opens his book, The I That Is We, with a healing accomplished by love alone. During this healing he experienced something that was more real to him than all else. He had no choice thereafter but to honor the new insight, and become involved in spiritual healing.

He relates that one day in the emergency room, as he approached a frightened and pain-gripped man with injections of Demerol and Valium, “a voice came into his head.” The voice rang within him: “You have nothing to give this man but love.” Handing the syringes to the astonished nurse, he approached the man and embraced him. Almost instantly the patient went limp in his arms and fell into a deep sleep.

“Thirty minutes later,” states Dr. Moss, “free of pain, the patient rose, thanked me with tears in his eyes, and left the hospital. His pain and hysteria had stopped in seconds, with no words and no drugs. Where there had been only hate, belligerence and fear, there now was awe, respect and caring in his eyes.”

Moderator: Dr. Moss was obedient to the voice of Truth when “it rang within [him],” and that obedience has since given him immense power for service

THE HUMAN MIND VS. GOD’S OWN KNOWING

Bessie: What limits understanding?

Margie: The understanding of Christian Science is severely limited at this period by the misconception that the human mind is a healing agent, whereas Mrs. Eddy speaks of her discovery as Mind Science, Mind-healing. Science is the knowledge of reality, Truth’s knowledge.

Moderator: Yes, Mrs. Eddy makes it clear that Science, capitalized- the Science God revealed to her— means that the knowing is God’s knowing. This is the tremendous insight that is opening up in this era of human history. This has never been seen before, namely, that the Christ is God’s own knowing. The Christ Mind, your own Mind, THE MIND YOU NOW HAVE (in reality), is God’s own knowing. For this reason she called it Christ Science; and “Christ is God,” as she tells us plainly in the first edition of Science and Health.

TRUTH’S OPERATION IN THE HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

Writing in 1897, Mrs. Eddy said, “The discovery and founding of Christian Science has cost more than thirty years of unremitting toil and unrest” (Mis. 382:6).

Elsie: Where or how was the founding done?

Grace: The founding could only be done through Truth’s operation in the human consciousness. The founding of Christian Science in human consciousness takes place as material beliefs are given up and the immortal facts of being are admitted. Speaking of herself, Mrs. Eddy said, “The Founder of genuine Christian Science has been all her years in giving it birth” (Mis. 39: 11).

Danny: If the founding of Christian Science is giving birth to it that would mean divine consciousness coming to birth.

Bill: The founding can be done only in human consciousness: “The physical healing of Christian Science results...from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear....These mighty works... are the sign of Immanuel, or ‘God with us,’—a divine influence ever present in human consciousness” (1910 ed. xi:9). “Spiritual sense lifts human consciousness into eternal Truth” (ibid. 95:31).

Still speaking of the founding, she states, “The divine message from God to men [speaks] to the human consciousness” (ibid. 332:10). Therefore “let the harmonious and true sense of Life and being take possession of human consciousness” (ibid. 355:12), remembering that “the heavens and earth to one human consciousness, that consciousness which God bestows, are spiritual, while to another, the unillumined human mind, the vision is material” (ibid. 573:6).

On page 297:14-16 (ibid.) we find that as the human consciousness rises higher, the reality of being is attained.

Marie: The divine Mind is the only Mind, isn’t it?

Johnny: Yes, we should never lose sight of the fact that the Mind we now have is the divine Mind, which is the only Mind there is. The so-called carnal mind is not mind at all; it is pure illusion, error. It is well here to once again remind ourselves:

Human beings are physically mortal, but spiritually immortal. [It is to the “spiritually immortal” that Mrs. Eddy is speaking]...Existing here and now, this unseen individuality is real and eternal (Un. 37:17).

Because she knew that “all consciousness is Mind,” Mrs. Eddy spoke to the whole human consciousness, and all consciousness heard her.

Moderator: As the explanation and founding of her revelation and discovery unfolded, it fulfilled Jesus’ prophecy of the Comforter which would guide into all Truth. (See John 14:16, 17, 26.)

Mrs. Eddy founded the Christ Science in human consciousness by replacing misconceptions with reality, with true conceptions.

Elsie: Misconceptions are due to the fact that we translate everything into matter, aren’t they?

Moderator: Yes, we mistakenly translate everything into matter, into something that seems to exist in time and space, and that can grow old, sicken, and die. Yet, all the time, what we are aware of, when rightly viewed, is “an image in Mind, the immediate object of understanding” (1910 ed. 115:17). Her teaching translates matter back into its original language which is Mind, and which gives the spiritual instead of the material signification. (See Hea. 7:8.)

THE ENABLING QUALITIES

EIsie: Could we have a brief review of what enabled Mrs. Eddy to make this great discovery?

Franey: The discovery of the allness of Mind was the result of an earnest, undeviating search for the Mind-cause of all things over a period of many years—-a search that time after time disappointed her because what she found in her search never crowned “the power of Mind as the Messiah” [which she knew was true.] (19 10 ed. 116:14) But she prayerfully persevered. There were no circumstances, however unfortunate, from which she was not able to extract some advantage. Each failure was instructive. Each problem was also instructive and, of course, there were always a lot of them around. She simply made tools of whatever came to hand.

Tommy: She turned every disappointment into a steppingstone to her goal, just as the oyster turns into a pearl the sand which annoys it.

Bill: A determined, prayerfully patient soul will do more with a rusty wrench than an unmotivated individual will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.

Anna: History has taught us that an individual who becomes a true incarnation of Love will wield an influence greater than that of a sceptred monarch. “Love alone is Life,” Mrs. Eddy wrote. It is the essence of life itself, and brings about the dynamic reunion of the individual with reality—infinite good. Mrs. Eddy realized that the way to acquire the maximum of spiritual power is to understand Love, to be Love. She speaks much of the purity of Love, and stated that the purer our love, the more lasting it tends to be,

Mrs. Eddy’s love for mankind was pure. It could therefore endure the suffering and ordeals imposed upon her. It gave her the courage and the absolute fearlessness to voice her message to the world in the face of terrible resistance, “the fixedness of mortal illusions and the human hatred of Truth” (1910 ed. 330:4).

Sally: Yes, Mrs. Eddy bore the remarkable and often painful vicissitudes of life with dignity and grace, always making the best of circumstances. In Miscellaneous Writings we find her philosophy:

To be a great man or woman, to have a name whose odor fills the world with its fragrance, is to bear with patience the buffetings of envy or malice-even while seeking to raise those barren natures to a capacity for a higher life....This will bring us also to look upon a kind, true, and just person, faithful to conscience and honest beyond reproach, as the only suitable fabric out of which to weave an existence fit for earth and heaven. (p. 228:9).

Moderator: So we can see that as she persevered, she found the answer “alone with [her] own being and with the reality of things.” She laid her all on the altar with no thought of reward. Impelled by such an unselfish motive she welcomed the suffering of the flesh. Instead of using spiritual power to banish suffering she used it to drive her thought higher in the scale of spiritual being as she patiently waited for the spiritual birth.

Of this selfless practice, and with profound insight she wrote:

I enjoy the touch of weakness, pain, and all suffering of the flesh because it compels me to seek the remedy for it, and to find happiness, apart from the personal senses” (Mis. 200:22).

Abraham: Mrs. Eddy’s history was a holy one. She made Truth, the message from God, known; she was therefore, of necessity, God’s messenger. Mrs. Eddy as a person did not originate Truth or God’s message. She sternly warned, “If you think of me as a person, that is animal magnetism. Principle does not work thru a person.” She quietly reminded the world she could be identified only through her writings: “Those who look for me in person, or elsewhere than in my writings, lose me instead of find me” (My. 120:2

Christian Science is the self-revelation of Truth and Love. Mrs. Eddy speaks of herself as a window pane through which Truth and Love could shine. A window pane is more transparent than a brick wall, and it was this transparency that made her the way shower to this age. Jesus could say: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” Because Mrs. Eddy was a clear transparency for Truth she could also say this. And, “I can of mine own self do nothing” (John 5:30). She said, “I got Mary out of the way.”

Anna: Totally oblivious of human self, Mrs. Eddy thought only of the Truth as it had revealed itself to her, and how to teach it to suffering humanity. It shouldn’t seem strange, therefore, that those who are sufficiently spiritually-minded to hear and receive what she revealed, would love, honor, and feel deepest gratitude to her, as God’s messenger, for making known to them Truth and Love which helped them in time of need, and which they would not otherwise have been aware of.

Abraham: What God was revealing to Mary Baker Eddy, His great Scientist, was so revolutionary it could not abide in the same consciousness with the ties of the flesh and their earthly objects of affection. Divine Love needed her whole heart and mind for its holy purpose.

Moses: Science and Health is Mrs. Eddy’s autobiography, as she herself made plain when she said, “Those who look for me in person or elsewhere than in my writings, lose me instead of find me.”

Moderator: Actually, Science and Health, in reality, is everyone’s autobiography. Each one’s autobiography is spiritual unfoldment. Each one writes his own “history.” However, each experiences Science and Health only as it is lived.

Rookie: A revealing incident preserved by the Carpenter Foundation relates that a little girl was playing on the porch where Mrs. Eddy was writing.

“What are you doing,” asked the child?

“I am working on the Life of God,” Mrs. Eddy replied.

SPIRITUAL INSIGHT

Moderator: Let’s take another reference from the first edition, and learn how understanding is gained.

P. 137:10: There must be a going out of personal sense, and coming in of the spiritual, to understand the Science of being, and to give a higher sense of Omnipotence whereby to control man and matter. Jesus taught and practiced the Science of being, tested the reception it would meet before it was understood, and notwithstanding the malice that error aimed at Truth, fulfilled his Soul-mission.

Rocky: His “Soul-mission” would be to prove his true changeless identity as Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love wouldn’t it?

Moderator: Yes, it enabled him to solve the Life-problem on its Principle: Life, Truth, and Love.

On p. 137:20, she says, “He who was God [meaning: he who had the Christ Mind; Spirit substance or nature, and Soul identity (spiritual understanding)] was ‘no respecter of persons.’ [God qualities alone count.]”

That vital statement came up earlier today. Emphatically she says of Christ Jesus: “He who was God, and not in man, was ‘no respecter of persons.”‘ The one Mind does not express itself in “persons,” but in divine ideas. As was set forth earlier, in reality there was no person named Jesus. What men witnessed was “the Word made flesh.”

P 137:22: Persecuted from city to city, he went about doing good, for which he was maligned and stoned. Jesus taught us Principle is God, and God is Love, but Pharisee and Priest affirmed God is person that can love and hate.

Anna: She continues feelingly, and we realize she is speaking from her own experience:

P. 137:26: Truth that is felt is hated by the sinner; for it cuts off right hands, plucks out the eyes, and calls on him to become wise. The belief of God [Mind] in matter, or a personal Deity, never yet made a Christian, and will go down in moral chemicalization that has already begun and will continue until God is admitted Soul outside of [mortal] sense, and the only Intelligence.

Mrs. Eddy saw that the basic lie which the carnal mind does not want uncovered is the belief in mortal man as a creator—the ingrained illusion that sex is the creator rather than Mind. She says here the uncovering of this lie “cuts off right hands, and plucks out the eyes, and calls on the sinner to become wise.” However, she learned through harsh and bitter experience to gently introduce disputed points on minds unprepared for them.

Marie. But even to the end, she was never one to beat around the bush. She always went straight to the heart of the problem. She looked directly into the Mind of God and could see REALITY and therefore could see the unreality of evil and error.

Moderator: That’s right, Marie, she had a wonderful spontaneous insight into the allness of God, infinite good, and this revealed the awful unreality, the awful deception of evil. We should all claim this extraordinary insight as our birthright.

In an earlier session (recorded in Vol. I of Mary Baker Eddy: God’s Great Scientist) we spoke of little Vito Magniamele, age 10, who could compute almost instantly the square root of any large number, and other similar extraordinary mathematical feats; and of Benjamin Blythe, who at the age of 6 could almost instantly calculate the number of seconds he had lived, including two leap years; and of how young Mozart would suddenly stop, take out his notebook and pencil saying to his companions, “They are singing in my ears; I must note it down.”

As we claim the Mind of Christ, we can have these sudden insights into the realm of Mind, the realm of spiritual reality, which will enable us to emulate the work of Christ Jesus and Mary Baker Eddy, and do even “greater works.”

Bill: Professor Wertheimer in Productive Thinking gives another example, on the mundane level, of solving a problem through sudden insight: Karl Gauss ... was a boy of six [a 1st grader] attending grammar school in a little town. The teacher gave a test in arithmetic and said to the class:

“Which of you will be first to get the sum of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4

+ 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10?”

Very soon, while the others were still busy figuring, little

Gauss raised his head: “Ich weiss es” (I know it or I have it).

“How did you get it so quickly?” exclaimed the surprised

teacher.

Gauss answered: “... and 10 make 11; 2 and 9 are again

11. And so on. There are 5 such pairs; 5 times 11 makes 55.”

Little Gauss had discovered the gist of an important

theorem.

Young Gauss had the faculty of keen mathematical reasoning. Mrs. Eddy had the faculty of keen reasoning in the spiritual realm. She maintained that “God has endowed man with… reason”; and “the dream that matter and error are something must yield to reason and revelation.” She said she won her way “to absolute conclusions through divine revelation, reason, and demonstration .... Reason and revelation were reconciled.” Again, she says, “Reason is the most active human faculty,” and that “reason, rightly directed, serves to correct the errors of corporeal sense.” (See 1910 ed. 106:7; 347:26; 109:20; 110:15; 327:29; 494:19.)

Grace: Mrs. Eddy had great spiritual insight when she saw that the basic lie is the belief in a mortal mind that creates a so-called mortal man out of nothing (Just as a person or object in our sleep dream is created out of nothing) and then calls this mortal something.

Error, sin, sickness, disease, death...is the false material sense of mind in matter; ...his false sense evolves, in belief, a subjective state of mortal mind which this same so-called mind names matter, thereby shutting out the true sense of Spirit.

My discovery that erring, mortal, misnamed mind produces all the organism and action of the mortal body, set my thoughts to work in new channels (1910 ed. 108:24).

The new channels gave her new spiritual insight.

Kathleen: Mrs. Eddy saw that mortal mind and matter were one. In a class she drove this teaching home with a story about the man who said, “My wife and I are one, and I am that one.”

MAN’S NATURE, NOT HIS BODY, DEATHLESS

Bessie: When Mrs. Eddy said, in the first edition, “Understanding can grasp even the infinite idea,” she was implying, wasn’t she, that all would sooner or later gain the full understanding of the Science of being?

Moderator: Yes, In the next reference observe Mrs. Eddy’s complete confidence that we will understand the Science of our God-being:

P. 143:1: Our Master had realized and demonstrated the Science of Life when he was found talking with his disciples after the burial. And whom the Rabbis had hoped to bury in a sepulchre, today is acknowledged God! And this God, and this Truth that Jesus taught and proved over eighteen centuries ago, in days to come will be understood.

Rookie: What would constitute a victory over death?

Moderator: Mrs. Eddy once answered that very question spontaneously, when it was put to her by artist Gilman. He wanted to know if victory over death meant to live in this life perpetually

Mrs. Eddy answered (as he recalled): “No; at least not to be visible to mortals to much extent. We overcome death when we fully overcome material sense, and then it is not able to behold us because Spirit is not appreciable to matter.”

To this, Gilman answered, “I suppose in that state of advancement we shall still have a body that will be just as real to us as this body.”

“Not in a finite personal way,” she said.

Gilman responded that he could not separate in his thought the idea of his identity from its embodiment in some form.

“That is true,” she said. “Your identity will have its embodiment, but it will not be finite in form and outline like this personal body. I think of our existence in that state more as we think of one who in some crisis rises to vigorous, noble action that is characteristic of that one’s nature. We do not think of a person’s body at such times, but of the force of mind, of the spiritual import” (Recollections of Mary Baker Eddy, p. 50).

Anna: It is certain that life will be understood in its perpetual newness and inspiration when the structure of our consciousness becomes one with the structure of reality and we learn that “Love alone is Life.” Under the marginal heading “Eternity of the Christ,” Mrs. Eddy refers to (Revelation 1: 17, 18), and explains: “The Revelator represents the Son of man as saying, ‘I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead [not understood]; and, behold, I am alive forevermore, [Science has explained me.]”‘ (1910 ed. 334:24). Our next two references from the first edition are on this subject:

P 143:17: [Jesus] proved for time and eternity that death is but a belief of personal sense, because Life is Spirit, alias God, and God the immortality and Soul of man.

P. 145:1: People’s opinions of Jesus were the very opposite of the man, and mark you wisely what will be said today of the Science he taught and its followers, and see if there be no resemblance between the reception it received in the past and that accorded it at present. We have few demonstrators today in part even, of the great Truth taught by Jesus; but we hesitate not to say it is the privilege and possibility of all Christians to follow his example, and what they claim to do, but they must keep his first command “to heal the sick,” as proof they understand this example, and the Principle that healed. We see some amelioration of the stake and gibbet in this age, but the vengeance with which doctrines and beliefs pursue Truth has not ceased in this century.

ADVANCED THINKERS GIVE US SUPPORT

Moderator: How does she end the second chapter, Imposition and Demonstration?

Abraham: With a reasoned, urgent appeal for faith in the truth of being and steadfast allegiance to the Science which shows us reality:

P. 145:16: When the Science of being’s purity confronts the impurity of sense, and humanitarianism lifts a voice above sectarianism, blows will fall liberally on Science; its true followers will be traduced and persecuted, and imposition and malice will smite [error’s] destroyer. Doctrines in general will trample on it, insomuch as it heals the sick without drugs, and must ultimately destroy sickness, when their “occupation will be gone.” But shall we serve the old masters because Truth has enemies, and disturbs the tranquillity of error? Wisdom has given us more foresight than this; to the advanced thinkers perceiving the scope and tendency of Truth we may look for support; while others will say to the Truth Jesus taught, “Crucify him that equated human birth with the great red Dragon.” (see S&H 56:12 and 567:14)

The highest stand-point of being is its Science, but opinions, doctrines and beliefs afford no demonstrable Principle to reach it and enable man to work out his own salvation; ‘tis Truth, the Principle of man that does this.

Then she asks:

P. 146:3: But is there not a smoother and broader path to harmony or heaven; and cannot Christianity be coupled with worldly peace and prosperity?

She answers this query:

P. 146:5: The very nature of [Science] is peace and blessedness, but its joys and triumphs are not earthly; [earthly triumphs and joys] are passing away from matter to Spirit. By this we do not mean death, nor a sudden ecstasy; but the gradual fading out of material things, of earthly desires, possessions and pleasures, and the coming in of purity, Truth, and immortality. The demands of personal sense will grow less, the appetite become simple, pride, malice and all sin yield to meekness, mercy and Love, until finally the belief of Life in matter yields to the consciousness that Life is Spirit, God. [“Mortals grow into immortals as babes grow into adults,” said Mrs. Eddy. (Christian Science Journal, Vol. 8, p. 13) 1. All good thoughts and deeds are Science that proceeds not from a doctrinal basis, but is Soul subduing sin, personal belief, personal pleasure, or pain; and revealing all harmony, righteousness and blessedness in our God-being.

Moderator: Thank you, Abraham. This is the way God’s great Scientist ends her second chapter in “The Precious Volume,” showing how we gradually overcome the imposition of a material sense of everything, and in consequence achieve demonstration.

IN CONCLUSION

Sally: We have discussed her first chapter, Natural Science (in Vol. I of Mary Baker Eddy: God’s Great Scientist); and her second chapter, Imposition and Demonstration, during our present session. In our next session we will start our examination of her third chapter in the first edition, Spirit and Matter. But before we begin Chapter III, could we look into what this Second Coming (which she said “will be the last”) has meant to humanity’s progress Spiritward?

FIRST EDITION THE HIGHEST

Moderator: Yes, Sally Who would like to say a word in general about this first edition and why many think it is her highest statement?

Anna: The first edition starts at the portals of heaven in the allness of good-the oneness of God and man; it actually starts with Principle containing its idea, where “Mind [our true and divine Mind] is its own great cause and effect.” The high statements in the first edition were Mrs. Eddy’s individual subjective vision. But, as Mrs. Orgain points out, “mountain tops are always lonely positions, so the mountain revelations must be left to men” -such as Jesus attained, saying: “I and the Father, [Principle], are one,” and Moses with his: I AM THAT I AM.

It was therefore Mrs. Eddy’s manhood—the manhood of woman—that brought the “little book,” the first edition. This is in accordance with, and in fulfillment of, Jesus’ prophecy in Revelation, 10th chapter, in which the “mighty angel” that brought the “little book” is characterized as masculine: “a rainbow was upon his head; his face was as it were the sun; his feet as pillars of fire; he had in his hand ... he set his right foot upon the sea and his left foot upon the earth; when he had cried .... etc.”

We know from the Book of Revelation (1:16) that Jesus, “the masculine representative of the spiritual idea,” who manifested the fatherhood of God, held seven stars in his right hand, indicating the seventh day or seventh stage of the ascending order in being. This—the seventh rung of the ladder—is the highest point, and it is where Woman starts her descent.

Tommy: If that is where Mrs. Eddy began, namely, on the seventh rung or seventh day in the ascending scale, then it would, of course, be perfectly natural for the first edition to be the highest, and its statements to be the most absolute, since they were made from the pinnacle of being.

Moderator: In Pulpit and Press (p. 2:30) Mrs. Eddy in her Dedicatory Sermon for The (little) Mother Church (symbolizing our true body) speaks of it as “reared on the foundation of Love, and pinnacled in Life,”—“Life represented by the Father” (S.&H. 561: 1). So man’s greatest height is Woman’s first step in the descending order. This is where the first edition begins; it looks out from the pinnacle of Life.

Moses: However, as Mrs. Orgain further points out, when we realize that Woman is a descending idea, that the city foursquare (as a bride) descends, we see that the greater the height, the further it is from the goal of universal man. This, again, is why the first edition is destined to be considered the highest, and the last edition— in order to meet the universal need—is destined to be the broadest.

Woman (Science), being generic (1910 ed. 561:22), must embrace the whole world. Woman must encompass the teachings of Jesus and the entire Bible as Jeremiah (31:22) prophesied: “A woman shall compass a man.” This, Jeremiah proclaimed, would be “a new thing in the earth.” It would begin where the Bible left off, and fulfill the scriptural prophecies concerning the Second Coming.

WOMAN (SCIENCE) MUST REACH, ENCOMPASS, ALL MANKIND

Abraham: Jesus’ seventh day viewpoint-his mountain-top vision— was so high he was able to reach only a few; whereas Mrs. Eddy’s writings, in the Second Coming, would fulfill Jesus’ promise of the Comforter, Divine Science, which would reach and endow all humanity with divine understanding. Jesus said the Comforter would be the spirit of Truth and would “guide ... into all truth .... [The Comforter, the spirit of Truth] shall teach you all things and bring all things to your rememberance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” (See St. John, chapters 16 and 14.)

MRS. EDDY GAVE MUCH THAT JESUS DID NOT

Tommy: Many today still do not recognize that Mrs. Eddy has given us much that Jesus did not. He is our great Exemplar, but as he himself said: “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.” And, as we have already quoted, he added that when the Comforter, the spirit of Truth, is come it “will guide you into all Truth....”

MRS. EDDY’S WRITINGS HER SUCCESSOR

Bill: Would this spirit of Truth which, of course, is Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and Mrs. Eddy’s other writings, be Mrs. Eddy’s successor?

Abraham: Yes. Science and Health is the bride of Spirit that supersedes Mary Baker Eddy (as Leader) and becomes one with the “Lamb,” purified human consciousness. Purified human consciousness is the bridgegroom that is wedded to the teachings of Science and Health and Mary Baker Eddy’s other writings.

Grace: Mrs. Eddy saw that God, the divine Principle, Love, is All; that this Principle included its idea. T!his viewpoint is Science itself; but she had to reduce this Science to human comprehension, namely to Christian Science. And she says it is necessary to understand “the spiritual idea” because “the spiritual idea has given the understanding a foothold in Christian Science” (1910 ed. 534:30).

THE MEANING OF “THE SPIRITUAL IDEA”

Bessie: Yes, what does she mean by “the spiritual idea”? Could we have a further explanation of it?

Moderator: Danny, would you like to answer that?

Danny: Mrs. Eddy has more than 40 references in our current edition of Science and Health to “the spiritual idea.” It seems to involve the oneness of man and woman—-meaning the oneness of Science (womanhood) including Christianity (manhood), and is therefore synonymous with Christ.

She says: “. . material sense will bite the heel of the woman, — will struggle to destroy the spiritual idea of Love; and woman [Science], this idea, will bruise the head of lust” (1910 ed. 534:27). (See My. 5:4.)

Here, again we see why she had to “hide” her message; why she said that mankind is face to face with the last enemy, human birth, and knows it not, as recorded in an early Collectanea. We discussed her teachings and those of Jesus at the beginning of this session under the topics of “What the Great Red Dragon Signifies,” and “Corporeal Sense of Creation Cast Out.”

Moderator: Yes, Danny, our work in Christian Science is to realize we have no selfhood apart from God, and to rid ourselves of all that would hide our present oneness with “the spiritual idea, the Holy Ghost and Christ, which,” she says, “enables you to demonstrate, with scientific certainty, the rule of healing, based upon its divine Principle, Love, underlying, overlying, and encompassing all true being” (ibid. 497:15). It is the spiritual idea, Science and Health says, that will “guide all right desires ... from a material sense of existence to the spiritual” (ibid. 566:6), teaching that the “kingdom of God ‘is within you,—is within reach of man’s consciousness here, and the spiritual idea reveals it. In divine Science, man possesses this recognition of harmony consciously in proportion to his understanding of God” (ibid. 576:21).

Elsie: Could you explain in a few words what “the spiritual idea” is?

Moderator: Margie, would you try?

Margie: Mrs. Eddy answers it in our current edition on page 562:3, under the marginal heading: “Spiritual idea revealed.” There she indicates that the spiritual idea is manhood as represented by Jesus, together with womanhood as represented by Mary Baker Eddy; it is their combined teachings. Their teachings constitute their identity to the human consciousness. (See My. 120:2.) In this reference on p. 562, she states: “As Elias presented the idea of the fatherhood of God, which Jesus afterwards manifested, so the Revelator completed this figure with woman, typifying the spiritual idea of God’s motherhood.” The spiritual idea is the Christ.

Danny: Mrs. Eddy’s revelation of the spiritual idea was concerned with “the two great wings” (see Rev. 12:14) of the male and female union—the wedding of the male and female elements.

As the understanding of our true being develops and we are resurrected from our present ignorance and materiality, humanity will experience Jesus’ prophecy that there would “be no more marrying nor giving in marriage but man would be as the angels. Then shall Soul rejoice in its own, in which passion has no part. Then white-robed purity will unite in one person masculine wisdom and feminine love, spiritual understanding and perpetual peace” (1910 ed. 64:20). This is what “the spiritual idea” is concerned with.

SHE BROUGHT FORTH A “MAN CHILD”

Marie: Jesus prophesied to St. John (Rev. 12:5) that the woman would bring forth “a man child.” Could someone explain what this “man child” is?

Abraham: The “man child” was Mrs. Eddy’s spiritual interpretation of Jesus. Her chapter Genesis is her conception of Jesus. It is a spiritual Jesus. The man child is Christian Science which must wed the bride, Divine Science, and Science itself. The “man child,” elsewhere, is shown as the “bridegroom.” The man child is a completely spiritual conception. The man child might be said to be a symbol of humanity embraced by Bride, Love.

Bessie: We could say, then, that Jesus as woman’s man child was the masculine representative of the spiritual idea.

Moderator: Yes, Bessie. In our current edition, p. 565:11, in correlating the woman bringing forth the man child, Mrs. Eddy definitely shows that it was Jesus; she speaks of him as “the masculine representative of the spiritual idea. And in The Detached Branch, p. 365, Mrs. Orgain gives this beautiful enlightening explanation:

Jesus’ natural mother fell so below the understanding of him that he was forced to detach himself from her (Matt. 12:46-50) in order to fulfill his higher mission which Mrs. Eddy as his mental mother declared. Her child was not an infant, but a “man child,” who was previously conceived and reared (to Mary’s sense) by another. The woman in the wilderness [the Mind of Mary Baker Eddy] never could have conceived the fleshly concept, nor an infant, since she says: “Manhood is its [life’s] eternal noon” (1910 ed. 246:12). Thus her child was a “man child.”

“Mrs. Eddy did with Jesus what she did with Genesis—dematerialized it, and conceived it as idea. Hence he was her “man child” (Rev. 12:5,1910 ed. 334:26). This placed Woman’s man child, alias Truth, in her own thought, thereby wedding it thereto. Thus the marriage of the Bride and the Lamb took place in heaven (the mind of Woman) in the wilderness of detachment from the ecclesiastically organized church, or the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Moses: I think it is important to remember that when we look for Mrs. Eddy in her Word, we find her as Bride and not Mother; for the Word is the Bride. (See My. 125:26, and 120:2.)

THE HIGHER MISSION OF WOMAN, SCIENCE

Johnny: Now that we have discussed the spiritual idea, and the “man child” (the dematerialized Jesus, the masculine representative of the spiritual idea) it would be of interest to me, and perhaps to others, to have a short discussion concerning whether it is the manhood or the womanhood of God that unfolds to human consciousness the higher mission?

Moderator: Abraham, what is your assessment?

Abraham: A pertinent and direct source for this determination can be found not only in the Glossary, but also in her characterization of “the ideal man,” and “the ideal woman” (1910 ed. 517:8-10).

Sally: It is super-important to realize the manhood and womanhood here spoken of and discussed are spiritual symbols, and it is hoped no one will confuse this male and female of God’s creating with mortal men and women-with worldly Adam-dreamers. “Spiritual teaching must always be by symbols” (ibid. 575:13). And the distinctions we are about to consider are the distinguishing differences that God, through Mrs. Eddy, saw proper to make—the same as we have it in Genesis 1:27, and 1910 ed. 508:21-23.

Abraham: Yes, that’s right, Sally. To now continue in settling the question whether manhood or womanhood is the greater quantity in the spiritual idea, we can first turn to the Glossary where on page 586:9, we find “Father” defined as eternal Life; the one Mind; the divine Principle commonly called God.”

“Mother” in the Glossary, p. 592:16, is defined as: “God; divine and eternal Principle; Life, Truth, and Love.”

Moses: It is most significant that Mother is not only defined as “God,” but as the entire trinity: “Life, Truth, and Love.” Mother includes or embraces Father, as Life and also as Principle. The underlying urge of Life is Woman’s fatherhood, and the overlying inspiration of Love is Woman’s motherhood. (See 1910 ed. 517: 10 and 569:1-2). We have already commented on “the rule of healing [which is] based upon its divine Principle, Love, underlying, overlying, and encompassing all true being.” This is in accord with her statement that “Love is the generic term for God,” and “Life is the spontaneity of Love, inseparable from Love” (My. 185:14).

Bill: Turning to Mrs. Eddy’s characterization of “the ideal man” and “the ideal woman” (1910 ed. 517:8-10) we see that “the ideal man corresponds .... to truth,” while “the ideal woman corresponds to Life and to Love.” In other words Woman (Science) corresponds to both the underlying and overlying Principle, Love. (See ibid. 496:18.) Since Life is the Father (and is what the ideal woman corresponds to) this would explain why Mary, the mother of Jesus, could be both Father and Mother why she as a “virgin” could bear her son. She represented the fact in Science that each individual is both Father and Mother, having both the manhood and womanhood qualities, being two individual natures in one.

Abraham: It would also explain how Mrs. Eddy could spiritually unfold both the masculine, as “man-angel” bringing the “little book”; and the feminine or Mother bringing forth the “man child” or true spiritual conception of Jesus to the human consciousness. (See ibid. 565:6-13.) And why she could bring forth the city foursquare as the union of the masculine and feminine qualities as prophesied in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 21.

Moderator: Science will ultimately lead us all to see that man (symbolized as Truth), and woman (symbolized as Love) are a “compounded spiritual individuality” in which “there is no impediment to eternal bliss” (1910 ed. 577:7).

MRS. EDDY COMPLETED THE WORK OF CHRIST JESUS

Moses: While “the Bible contains the recipe for all healing”(ibid. 406:1), still the scriptures must be translated into the new tongue” of the “inspired Word,” the impersonal Womanhood of the writings of Mary Baker Eddy. Through the spiritual translation, which her teaching explains, all qualities are united in one whole generic man. Thus did she fulfill her mission to complete the work of Christ Jesus on earth.

Francy: “The second appearing of Jesus is, unquestionably, the advancing idea of God as in Christian Science” (Ret. 70:20). The city foursquare is Christian Science—it is Science (Second Coming) added to Christian (First Coming).

Moderator: We could bring out many more comparisons between the First and Second Coming, but these references will suffice to show the giant leap forward that came with the Advent of Mary Baker Eddy and the Science God sent to humanity through her Discovery and Founding, her Revelation and Demonstration as she dipped her pen in the well of Love and left her legacy to bless mankind for all eternity.

In closing this session, I would like to read the article of a writer for the Denver News, published in 1906, which bears eloquent testimony to what one lone woman’s pure love for humanity accomplished within her own lifetime:

[Denver (Col.) News]—1906The dedication of the new Mother Church of the Christian Scientists in Boston is not a matter of interest to that city alone, but to the nation; not to the nation alone, but to the world; not to this time alone, but to history.

The growth of this form of religious faith has been one of the marvels of the last quarter century. It is, in some respects, the greatest religious phenomenon of alI history. That a woman should found a religious movement of international sway; that its followers should number many thousands during her lifetime; that hundreds of great buildings should be filled at every meeting Sundays or on week-days with devout worshippers, wooed by no eloquence of orator or magnetic ritual,—all these things are new, utterly new, in the history of religious expression. Unaccountable? Hardly so. Whatever else it is, this faith is real and is given very real tests. Thousands upon thousands believe that it has cured them of diseases many and diverse. All the passionate love for life with which nature endows the children of men, grips hold of their faith and insures fidelity in pain or death for self or dear ones. But, while health seeking is the door to this gospel for many, it is not the only source of appeal. A faith which teaches that hate is atheism, that discord is poisonous, that gloom is sin, has a mission that can be readily grasped by sick or well.

The world is enormously richer for this reincarnation of the old, old gospel of “on earth peace, good will toward men.” (News item included in My. p, 89:22).

Let us finish with a part of Mrs. Eddy’s 4th of July Address:

“To-day we commemorate not only our nation’s civil and religious freedom...the liberty of the sons of God, the inalienable rights and radiant reality of Christianity, whereof our Master said: “The works that I do shall he do;” and, “The kingdom of God cometh not...(with knowledge obtained from the senses)”, but “the kingdom of God is within you,”—within the present possibilities of mankind.

“Think of this inheritance! Heaven right here...and men as angels who, burdened for an hour, spring into liberty, and the good they would do, that they do....All error, physical, moral, or religious, will fall before Truth demonstrated....

“[Christian Science] is the pearl priceless whereof our Master said, if a man findeth, he goeth and selleth all that he hath and buyeth it. Buyeth it! Note the scope of that saying, even that Christianity is not merely a gift, as St. Paul avers, but is bought with a price, a great price; and what man knoweth as did our Master its value, and the price that he paid for it?” (See Mis. 251:12-253:5.)

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Readers looking at the picture (shown opposite) from a little distance will suddenly see the most beautiful picture of Jesus ever to come to light “a face full of tenderness and love.”

Its history is as follows:

“A Chinese photographer was riding one day through the snow covered countryside of interior China. His soul was troubled. He had been witnessing a great movement toward Christianity among his friends since the Japanese invasion. He longed to know the truth of what he had been hearing from Christian missionaries. As he rode along, he said, “Lord, if I could only see Thy face, I would believe.” Instantly a voice spoke to his heart, “Take a picture! Take a picture!” He looked out at the melting snow, forming pools of water and revealing here and there the black earth It was an unattractive scene. Nevertheless, being thus strangely compelled, the man descended and focused his camera on the snowy roadside. Curious to know the outcome of the incident, he developed the film at once on returning to his home. Out from among the black and white areas of the snow scene a Face looked at him, full of tenderness and love-the face of Jesus! He became a Christian as the result And because the Chinese people think that God has in this wonderful way revealed Himself to them in the hour of their trial, many have since found the Saviour through the picture, as the story of it is told in various parts of China.”

*Christian Scientists familiar with Mary Baker Eddy’s illustrated poem, Christ and Christmas, will also see in the picture the head of the woman (representing Science) who looks down on the two divisions of the dragon’s tail, typifying lust and hypocrisy-(i.e., she [Science] prayerfully faces the twin evils of lust and hypocrisy until they are overcome.)

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