Science and Health
and the
Church Manual

Jesus: Pentecost: Mary Baker Eddy: Today

W. Gordon Brown

PART II CHURCH MANUAL

THE SIXTEEN SETS OF BY-LAWS

9. Guardianship of Church Funds

The word "fund" is from the same root as "foundation." It implies a deposit of resources, a store, a supply, stock, or capital. The word "fundamental," from the same root, means "a principle, law .. which serves as the groundwork [Foundation] of a system" (Wbr). To fund means to provide capital for. Spiritually understood, church is the body of the Principle on which it is Founded, and by which it is funded.

For man to be self-governed, having no outside dependency (as in the previous section) is (in this section) for him to be supplied infinitely from within his own being with everything he humanly needs.

Science and Health, as the self-declared body of Principle, teaches the nature of the ideas, qualities, and intrinsic values, that flow and circulate from Principle to Principle, and which constitute, in doing so, the limitless income that unfolds to humanity from this Principle's capital resources.
And this indeed is the theme of the textbook's ninth :chapter, "Creation," where, over and over again, we are told how all creation is infinite, boundless, without limits of any kind, and how it can never be put into an expendable organic form.

What concerns us therefore in this ninth set of By-laws is watchful guardianship of the church's (body's) divine resources, with their limitless spiritual capital and funds. The membership, through its Treasurer, must constantly and conscientiously guard these funds, for they constitute the church's wealth, and its self-sustaining treasure. "If we do not control our possessions with the understanding that they are spiritual," Mrs. Eddy once said to students, "they will control us with the belief that they are material" (Coll p206). At the same time, there is the Finance Committee which, under the heading "Provision for the Future," has Jurisdiction over the Board of Directors should this Board fail to comply with the By-laws of the Church. The lure of ecclesiastcal power, commercialism, and vested interest, causing annulment of the By-laws by waiving the estoppel clauses, would surely constitute the "deviation from duty" here referred to.

But are the three members of this Committee merely three persons as such? Are they not, at a deeper spiritual level, the "wisdom, economy, and brotherly love" that must consistently characterize "all the proceedings of the members of The Mother Church"? Do not the economics of a true sense of capital involve the wise distribution of brotherly love, as the basic commodity of the church in Philadelphia and therefore of the Church of Christ, Scientist?

"The love of money is the root of all evil," says Paul in his first letter to Timothy (I Tim 6-10). But it is the great red dragon, the instigator of "filthy lure," the false material sense of money, that is really the root of all evil. The dragon is lust for political, ecclesiastical, and commercial power and gain. He is greedy for an increasing quantity of matter, in contrast to the Christian Scientist's desire for a true sense of substance, available infinitely to all men equally because it cannot be finitely quantified.

Hence, at the point of the ninth section of "The Apocalypse," envy, greed, and the lust to possess things personally, are cast triumphantly from heaven to earth - cast subjectively, that is, out of individual consciousness, on account of the spiritual self-government, spiritual free enterprise and democratic freedom under God, established in the preceding tone.

This idea of government by divine Principle, including divine economics, is the great world-saving truth that needs to be published far and wide over the face of all the earth for the salvation of human society.

10 The Christian Science Publishing Society

The idea of unlimited divine substance, supplying and sustaining the body of mankind, is what (ideally) Christian Science publishes abroad in the course of its world-healing mission. In terms of the textbook's tenth chapter, "Science of Being," that which the Publishing Society is commissioned to publish is the Science of the world's true being. There appears therefore at the end of the chapter the "Platform" of infallible divine metaphysics on which the Scientist learns to stand, and from which he views his world as it exists in divine Science.

The Platform's final sevenfold statement focuses this scientific outlook. It tells of men and nations unified, one brotherhood of man, no more wars, man loving his neighbor as himself, all that is wrong in social, civil, criminal, political and religious codes annihilated, the sexes equalized, and nothing left that can sin, suffer, be punished, or destroyed.

As part of Mary Baker Eddy's founding career, four periodicals, four propagation channels, became the means of publishing to the human race the Science of its own real being. They were the Christian Science Journal (indicative of the Word), the Christian Science Sentinel (indicative of the Christ), the Christian Science Herald (indicative of Christianity), and the Christian Science Monitor (indicative of Science).

These four periodicals thus correspond to the four sides of the holy city, which stand, in turn, for the spiritual reality of all humanity. Just as the city's first three sides reach their natural climax in the fourth side, and are included within this fourth side, so the first three of the above publications are fulfilled in the worldwide purpose of the fourth. This is because the ultimate Science of the world's being lies in a race that is one and spiritually undivided. The declared purpose of the Monitor was, accordingly, "to spread undivided the Science that operates unspent" (My 353:16).

Because the world, in Science, is united both divinely and humanly, its capital resources, and its natural energy resources, can never be diminished, used up, or spent. Division depletes and finally destroys, because it quantifies substance materially.

When, therefore, in the tenth section of "The Apocalypse," Michael and Gabriel cast from heaven to earth the evil inherent in an expendable sense of life, a "loud voice" is heard singing a song "sweeter than has ever before reached high heaven." The words of the song are: "Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ." This is the song which the "brethren" sing to the world as constituting "the word of their testimony."
Yet it is not enough merely to publish the good news. In order that the news shall be disseminated and understood it must also be systematically taught.

11. Teaching Christian Science

The need, in this case, is that Christian Science shall be presented in such a way that humanity brings it forth indigenously from within its own spiritual loins. "We understand best that which begins in ourselves," Mrs. Eddy wrote, "and by education brightens into birth" (My 253:26). In the measure that this becomes the way of teaching, and therefore the way of birthing humanly the idea of God, human antipathy to Christian Science ceases.

Objections to Christian Science, such as those cited in the textbook's eleventh chapter, "Some Objections Answered," are, in this way, met and overcome divinely, rather than through human confrontation and argument. This lays the axe at the root of the objections which, as shown in the eleventh section of "The Apocalypse,"are fundamentally the workings of occultism.

People who are taught to bring forth Christian Science from within their own being understand that latent, unconscious occultism is (in belief) the source of all that objects to, and opposes itself to, Christian Science. In this case the people are not a subservient, gullible mass, but are individually free, and democratically self-governed, in accordance with the preceding sets of Manual By-laws. Outside objections will then have given way to subjective understanding, and therefore to individual birth-giving.

The word "occult" is from the root "to hide." Animal magnetism, acting through occultism seeks to hide from the people what Christian Science truly is. The dragon would mesmerize the human race into believing that Christian Science is alien to humanity, instead of being inherently natural and subjective. To counter this hypnotic influence the proper teaching of Christian Science opens the eyes of the people to what their identity really is as Christian Science.

Articles 26 and 27 of the Manual By-laws deal respectively with "Teachers" and "Pupils." Teachers must have certificates; they must attest authoritatively to prospective pupils that they are properly qualified to teach Christian Science. What this means (ideally) is that they know how to let God not man be the teacher.
All of the meanings of the word "pupil" is "the pupil of the eye." A pupil lets in the light. What the pupil of Christian Science lets into consciousness is the understanding that spiritual enlightenment is already within him, and that this does not really have to be inseminated into him from outside.

Mary Baker Eddy once defined the true idea of teaching Christian Science as follows: "When I teach Science," she said, "it is not woman that addresses man, it is the Principle and Soul bringing out its idea by blotting out the belief that otherwise hideth it (Essays and Other Footprints p 227) - that is to say, by eliminating the belief that man teaches man personally instead of the Principle teaching him impersonally.

Once the attitude to teaching is, in this way, a means of internal birth-giving, then it is that humanity swallows up the dragon's flood of occult propaganda and mental malpractice, and no longer objects to Christian Science because of its own prejudiced misunderstanding.

12. Board of Education

The twelfth group of By-laws in the Manual corresponds, in the textbook, to the twelfth chapter, "Christian Science Practice," and, in "The Apocalypse," to the twelfth section, where humanity (earth) finally swallows up in translation the dragon's drowning flood, or its "sea" of hidden, elemental occultism. To this end, humanity is seen to be birthing Christian Science from within its own consciousness. Giving birth to the true and swallowing up the false is one simultaneous operation.

Then it is that the dragon is not only disposed of in heaven but on earth as well. Science, in other words, has operated divinely and humanly at the same time - simultaneously as divine Science and as Christian Science. Through the proper balance of healing and teaching or of spirit and letter the actual nonexistence of divisive animal magnetism is under stood and proved.

In 1899, Mary Baker Eddy instituted a "Board of Education" as what she called an "auxiliary" to her (by then)
reopened college and re-formed church, both of which she had dissolved in 1889.

In her words, the new Board of Education was the outcome of her having, in 1889, "sought in solitude and silence a higher understanding of the absolute scientific unity which must exist between the teaching and letter of Christianity [corresponding to college] and the spirit of Christianity [corresponding to church]" (My 246).
The advent of the Board of Education thus signified that spirit and letter, church and college, healing and teaching, were one and inseparable. Neither was objective to, nor existed apart from, the other. Hence the relationship between this twelfth subject of the By-laws and the twelfth chapter of the textbook, the "practice" chapter. Note therefore the statement made in the article "The Way" (written also in 1889, the year of the dissolution of the two separate organizations) that "the student who heals by teaching and teaches by healing, will graduate under divine honors, which are the only appropriate seals for Christian Science" (Mis 358:4).

The real letter is the scientific understanding of the spirit- the understanding, that is, of Spirit itself, hence the spirit must always take precedence over the human mind's belief in a letter that can apparently be divorced from the spirit. Thus we read in the By-laws at this point of how "Healing [is] better than Teaching."

The word educate explains what teaching is in its truly spiritual signification. Deriving from the same root as educe, it means, to lead or draw forth that which is "conceived as present in a latent or undeveloped form . . . to fit for a calling by systematic instruction" (Wbr).

The same is true of the process of healing. The chapter "Christian Science Practice" speaks therefore of the patient's body as "the temple of the Holy Ghost," and of man's God-given "spiritual power to resuscitate himself." Spiritual education and spiritual healing indeed move forward hand in hand.

Published by
Gordon and Estelle Brown
England 1988
© Copyright W. Gordon Brown 1988
ISBN 0 904320 05 7
Printed by Villiers Publications Ltd 26a Shepherds Hill, London N6 5AH