Last week we presented the final installment of: Science and Health and The Church Manual—by Gordon Brown. The second half of this book is entitled JESUS: PENTECOST: MARY BAKER EDDY: TODAY--The book can be purchased from—

This weeks presentation is an Essay by Gordon Brown published in 1970 in a Pamphlet entitled—HUMANITY AND CHRISTIAN SCIENCE—SOME BURNING ISSUES

IN SEARCH OF AUTHORITY

Not as the Scribes

Never, surely, in the history of civilization was there so much rebellion against authority—against the status quo of established society—as is seen in the world today. This is particularly evident in the exploits of the younger generation. A Students' Revolt is taking place on a world scale. On every hand the old way of life is in dire fear of being overthrown. In general terms, youth today is in a state of rebellion against what it feels is the hypocritical, artificial, way of life provided by the older generation's methods of education—against its predetermined, war-prone ways of indoctrination and control, and its apparent inability to communicate in–depth with the new generation.

The Spirit of the divine Science of man, moving today on the waters of world consciousness, is nowhere more evident than in the demand that is taking place for a different approach to education, for spontaneously subjective self-revelation, self-realization, a deeper and freer sense of inclusiveness and the interchange of ideas, as against preconceived theories, and predigested knowledge superimposed and built up from outside.

Much of the overturning which we see taking place today is reality appearing in counterfeit form. Jesus gives the reason for such phenomena when he cites the nature of reality itself! He says: "The kingdom of God is within you." In Latin, the verb "to educate" meant originally "to lead out." Today's involuntary, universal urge is that what is already within man shall be freely and spontaneously led out into expression through a new understanding of education and a new attitude to life.

The New Testament establishes the "New Covenant." The inevitability of this was foreseen by the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament. "The author of the epistle to the Hebrews, the most 'educated' of the New Testament writers, quotes Jeremiah's words in "his own treatise on the New Covenant." He writes: "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah ...after those days... I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts, and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people. And they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest" (Heb 8:8-11). The New Covenant implies a new responsibility on the part of individual and collective man—a new educational order, a new and vital inner contact with the divine, such as the young today are instinctively seeking in their attitude to education. The time when mankind actually begins to experience what the New Covenant promises would seem to be very close at hand.

It is true to say, on the surface, that the new generation is seeking to overthrow the old systems of values without having found better ones to take their place. There is an awareness that an all-powerful impulse towards spontaneity and self-expression is at work in world-consciousness, but instead of this being understood spiritually it is too often equated with psychedelic drug-taking, dangerous excursions into the unconscious psyche, religious self-hypnosis, and instincts of mass relationship stimulated and liberated by beat music. It is believed to be manifesting itself also as the so-called New Left, Black Power, and so on.

Assessed at a deeper level, this rebellion against parental and hierarchical authority is a shadow that precedes its own substance. It is really a search for a true authority—for an altogether different kind of authority. It predicts the gradual return on the part of humanity as a whole to man's original, impartial governmental authority—to the Principle that rules everlasting reality irrespective of the mythological "fall."

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