Science and Health
and the
Church Manual

Jesus: Pentecost: Mary Baker Eddy: Today

W. Gordon Brown

PART I SCIENCE AND HEALTH

Scientific Acceptance

If, on account of inadequate understanding, or lack of spiritual vision, it seemed not humanly possible to implement Principle's instructions in 1910, it has surely become imperative, in view of the present church and world predicament, to implement them now. For the fact is that a vast increase of spiritual understanding and comprehensive vision has been divinely imparted to Christian Scientists during the intervening years.

What makes it possible, that is to say, for us to be obedient today is the developing revelation, that has been taking place since 1910, of the nonsectarian Science and system of Christian Science, enshrined indelibly in Science and Health, and brought to light outstandingly in the 1920s and 1930s by the Christian Science practitioner and teacher, John W. Doorly, through his indefatigable and far-reaching penetrations into the textbook's scientific meaning.

Despite virulent opposition to what he revealed it is now an incontrovertible fact that John Doorly was the first Christian Scientist to put before the Christian Science movement the transcendent scientific import of the textbook's several classes and orders of capitalized terms for the one absolute God - principally, the seven synonymous terms, Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love, teaching what the infinite consists of diversely (S & H 465), and the four sides of the holy foursquare city, the Word, Christ, Christianity, Science, teaching how the infinite operates integrally (S & H 575).

The respective scientific values of these two fundamental categories of the textbook's new tongue, bringing to light the spiritual mother tongue of mankind, opened up the book's world-wide Science, and heralded for humanity the eventual reign of the Principle of world peace. Armed with a language of impersonal divine values, "Christ, God's idea," comes to "rule all nations and peoples - imperatively, absolutely, finally - with divine Science" (S & H 565:16).

Under God, John Doorly carried forward the work of other great thinkers in the Christian Science movement directly in line with the original comprehensiveness of Mary Baker Eddy's own discovery. For example, to mention some of the most outstanding: Edward Kimball, Bicknell Young, Herbert Eustace, Alice Orgain, Martha Wilcox, Hendrick de Lange, and many more besides.

John Doorly, it seems, was commissioned to gather together within the wholeness of his own vision the individual emphases which others had stressed, and to present for the first time the idea of order and wholeness, Science and system, necessarily inbuilt in Mary Baker Eddy's original revelation, and destined to be brought to light in God's appointed time when thought was able to perceive it. The emphasis in his case was indeed "the divine Science of man... woven into one web of consistency without seam or rent" (S & H 242:25).

Accordingly, his vision culminated in a spiritually mathematical depiction of the holy mother city which was subsequently called "The Matrix." This accorded with the description in Paul's epistle to the Galatians of the "Jerusalem above" which, in its freedom from the bondage of despotic legalism, he declared to be "the mother of us all."

This is the symbol which played a key role in John Doorly's elucidation of the divine Science of the Scriptures, and which also revealed to him the relationship between the city's sixteenfold structure and the orderly design of the first sixteen chapters of Science and Health first published in 1902. Incidentally, 1902 was the year when he himself first became a Christian Scientist.

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