Science and Health
and the
Church Manual

Jesus: Pentecost: Mary Baker Eddy: Today

W. Gordon Brown

PART I SCIENCE AND HEALTH

SCIENCE AND HEALTH'S FIRST SIXTEEN CHAPTERS

1. Prayer

Prayer is the means of our conscious union and communion with God. Through what the chapter calls the "prayer of Soul," the "prayer of Jesus Christ," or the "Lord's Prayer," we unite with the eternal and infinite source of our being.

God's work is already done. His creation is already finished. Infinity is already perfect and fulfilled. This infinitude of good, unfolding within us, reveals what we truly are as the Son of the Father-Mother God.

Taking the end (infinite perfection) from the beginning, in this way, means that from the beginning of our communion with the divine Word of God (Science and Health) we have started to reverse the arguments of the serpent by handling it tail first.

This is confirmed for us in the opening section of "The Apocalypse," where Science and Health, the little open book, is represented as complete and fulfilled from beginning to end before we start to digest its meaning from the first to the last chapter.

Science in its Health, or wholeness, typifies thus the fathomless depths of the womblike source of our forever unfolding life. From within the matrix of the motherhood of God, our identity (humanly) is moulded, and formed, and brought progressively to birth.

We are beginning to stand on our own two feet. As in the Apocalypse's opening section, our right foot is on the sea, and our left foot on that which comes up out of the sea, namely, on the earth. The belief that we originate carnally, subject to a mortal birth-death cycle, is being reversed through communion with the real source of our being, as that from which we emanate and to which we return.

Union with God as our divinely creative source is what we fervently desire and for which we hunger. Hence we start to eat up the little book at the point of its opening chapter. And because of our "earnest longings," our inward desires are "moulded and exalted" divinely before they take form humanly "in words and in deeds." We begin to understand that we are born divinely of the heavenly mother city, the "mother of us all" (Gal 4:26), and not of the sea of primitive mythology (regarded by mythologists as the "mother of all that lives"). In other words, our unseen, secret union with God is reflected openly in the life we live, in the words we say, and in the deeds we do.

No longer are we "whited sepulchres." Our Christ-identity has begun to be established on scientific foundations, and nothing henceforth can prevent our solving the great life-problem according to the example of the Way-shower, Jesus, in the chapter "Atonement and Eucharist." On the basis of the Principle taught in the first chapter, we bear witness to the total demonstration of this Principle as unfolded in the second chapter, in order to begin to put the Principle into practice ourselves from the point of the third chapter onwards.

2. Atonement and Eucharist

The second chapter, therefore, is where, in obedience to the outlook established in the first, we see the individual Jesus solving from beginning to end the problem of "organization and time" which "have nothing to do with Life" (S & H 249:19) - the problem, that is, of humanity's seeming imprisonment within the confines of mortal body.

That which we accept as foundational to progress is the fact that, in the first chapter, God's work is already done divinely, while, in the second, this, by reflection, is proved to be done, humanly. Jesus, that is to say, has already proved that the Son of the Father-Mother God (all of us in our unity as we truly are) is sinless, diseaseless, deathless, and therefore untouched by the mortal birth-death cycle.

Correlatively, in the second section of "The Apocalypse," the God-crowned woman in heaven, birthing on earth her man child, is the vision of the human race in its true identity birthing from within its own real being its spiritual selfhood as the Son of God, revealed to it in Christian Science. The symbolic parallel in the second chapter is Mary, in "self-conscious communion with God," acknowledging God to be the real Father of man, and bringing forth the man child, Jesus, in consequence.

Thus the moon, with its cycle of twelve monthly periods, is under the woman's feet. She is not, in other words, birthing her child in accordance with mundane biological laws.

And therefore what this points to is the divine idea of marriage and progeny, or to what God has already joined together which nothing can put asunder. This spiritual idea of wedlock - this Eucharistic at-one-ment with our divine source, where we partake of the flesh and blood, the letter and spirit, of what we truly are in divine Science--begins at once to reverse and translate, in our human experience, the serpentine belief in sexual origin, or of our being cut off from God and from our brother man.

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