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

Conclusion

When, in the Old Testament, Israel's seventy years of Babylonian captivity were over, and her period of rebuilding began, the result was a new Jerusalem, a newly arisen resurrection body, in which she then could dwell.

What this rebuilding foreshadowed was not only Jesus' demonstration of deathless life in the coming era of the New Testament, but also the 'latter days' of Christian Science when all mankind would likewise be freed from everything that Babylon stood for.

Israel's new built city was thus but a prefiguring symbol of the eventual New Jerusalem of Revelation 21, the holy mother city of universal love and peace, the ultimate reality of a divinely civilized human society—in fact, the Christian Science Society of mankind.

As the New Testament dawned, and the advent of worldwide Christianity unfolded, this Apocalyptic New Jerusalem began to manifest itself to the human race, with the result that nothing henceforth could stop the spiritual rebirth of society from ultimately being fulfilled.

The reason Israel was able to rebuild her stricken temple and city was because she had studied, understood, and obeyed the book of the law of Moses, the book of the "law of God" (spoken of in Nehemiah 8), which was brought into prominence in the course of the captivity, and which, in the hands of Ezra, taught her how to rebuild her identity individually and on a world scale.

So it must be in Christian Science regarding obedience to the law of God, appearing as the By-laws of Mary Baker Eddy, recorded in the Church Manual. Once this obedience is put into effect, the Church of Christ, Scientist (which, over the years, disobedience has disastrously undermined) will be resurrected—rebuilt on its orginal divine foundations—and freedom from ecclesiastical and political servitude will ensue for the Christian Science movement and the world.

As in the case of Moses, therefore, let the Christian Science church catch by the tail the serpentine rejection of the law of God, recover for itself its rod of deliverance, and thereafter use this healing rod as a staff upon which to lean. For this will release it from the stultifying limits of material organization, will put it back into the hand of divine Principle, will restore it to the arms of Love, or to where its founder left it in 1910.

In other words, it will "bridge over with life discerned spiritually" (S & H 598:26) the apparent death-interval of organization and time which claims to have imposed itself between 1910 and now, or during the period when the Manual has apparently been cast to the ground. Indeed, it will bridge over not only the interval of the past seventy or so years, but also the far greater time interval that has elapsed since the ascension of Jesus, when he proved on behalf of all mankind the truth of eternal, deathless life.

The descent of the Holy Ghost which immediately followed the ascension, was the advent of the same universal Science of Life, the foreshadowing of the same great mother city of mankind, which is revealing itself today in its order, its structure, its absolute Science and system, and is teaching the actual living form of the world as it truly is. The events of the day of Pentecost marked the beginnings of a newborn huan race.

Today's overwhelming need is thus to understand Christian Science's Pentecostal origins—its descent to mankind from the altitude of Jesus' ascension—in order that the world shall respond to its own true identity and be scientifically reborn.

Then will "man the generic term for mankind" succeed to the leadership of the Christian Science movement, in accordance with Mrs Eddy's nomination in 1901 regarding her successor. "What remains to lead on the centuries and reveal my successor," she declared, "is man in the image and likeness of the Father-Mother God, man the generic term for mankind" (My 347).

The Christian Science church, like Israel's new Jerusalem, like the body of Jesus at the resurrection, and like Mary Baker Eddy's second church organization, will then be "temporarily rebuilt" (S & H 576:17)—translated from death to life prior to being outgrown altogether, and, as its founder foresaw, "exist alone in the affections" needing "no organization to express it" (Mis 145).

Christ, Truth, outside (never inside) the body of Jesus, resurrected this body from the grave and temporarily reproduced it, preparatory to its final translation. Likewise Christian Science, in its nonsectarian reality, developing today not inside the church organization but outside it, will—must by its very nature—temporarily rebuild the dying church body. Christian Science can no more leave this body to disintegrate in a tomb than could the Christ in the case of the body of Jesus.

And the form the resurrected church will take? Mrs Eddy exemplified this in 1889 when she herself dissolved her central Boston organization and left only self-governing (independent God-governed) branch churches to constitute the Christian Science church.

During the three years' interlude (1889-1892) that followed the dissolution, there was no visible centralized church. Mrs Eddy herself retired from the organizational scene to seek and to find what she called "a higher hope for the race" (My 246:11). Correspondingly, the body of Jesus, following the crucifixion, was for three days removed from mortal sight. During these "three days' work in the sepulchre" when he "set the seal of eternity on [organization and] time" (S & H 44:7), Jesus himself sought and found, as the race's highest conceivable hope, proof of man's eternal indestructible life.

In 1892, therefore, commensurate with the proof which Jesus had furnished, a rebuilt, resurrected church (a "spiritually organised Church" - Ret 44:30) began to take form in Boston. Its name was "The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts" (Man 1).

Yet the 'mother' element had inbuilt into it, in the form of its Manual's 29 estoppel clauses, the seeds of its eventual self-dissolution, or its own self-translation. As in the case of the resurrection of Jesus (that preceded the body's final ascension), the rebuilding was but temporary (see S & H 576:17).

Ideally, the process of the self-translation of the Mother Church was designed to take place when Mary Baker Eddy left the human scene in 1910, as had been foreshadowed by her retirement from public office in 1889, when she dissolved her first organization.

Edward Kimball once asked Mrs Eddy what would happen to the Christian Science movement if she were to pass on. "It would degenerate into material prosperity," she replied. He then asked what would happen if she ascended. "The Mother Church would be dissolved," she said (Coll 252).

Sometimes the Mother Church was called 'Mother's Church,' while in the Manual itself (p 102) it is referred to as "Mary Baker Eddy's Church." Church being a symbol of body, and Mrs Eddy herself being the representative of "the woman in the Apocalypse [who] symbolizes generic man (S & H 561:22), Mother's Church was in fact the symbol of the body of the human race.

Like the ascension of Jesus, therefore, that led, at the Pentecost, to the descent of the Holy Ghost as the reborn selfhood of mankind, so (symbolically) the ascension of the Mother Church organization (that took place ideally in 1910) was succeeded in the years that followed by the discovery of the original absolute Science of Christian Science, contained in the textbook, Science and Health, that (in Revelation 10) came down from God out of heaven. By reason of this discovery in the textbook of a system of ideas and their divine relationships (teaching the reality of the body of mankind) this true identity of the human race is destined, in the course of the coming seventh millennium of the history of civilization, to bring itself progressively to light.

Reiterating once more the issue that so profoundly concerns us today: Two classes of capitalization are basic to the language of this healing system found within the textbook's pages. They are the seven of Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love, teaching what the infinite consists, of diversely, and the four of the Word, Christ, Christianity, Science, teaching how the infinite functions integrally. These two categories of capitalized terms for the oneness of God, man, and the universe, represent to the Christianly scientific student the ascension standpoint of the Godhead itself, from which his thought descends to that of mankind to prove, on the one hand, the allness of God, and, on the other, the nothingness of evil.

From this exalted viewpoint of the divine Principle, Love, Christian Science solves through translation and universal healing the problem of organic life. Demonstrating the allness of Life, Truth, Love, it proves the nothingness of sin, disease, death. As the omnipotent Word, it proves the unreality of birth as the omniscient Christ, it proves the unreality of sin; as the omnipresence of universal Christianity, it proves the unreality of disease; and as the omni-action of eternal Science, it proves the unreality of death.

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