Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/206

178 Your Bible and your textbook, pastor and ethical tenets, do not mislead the seeker after Truth. These unpretentious preachers cloud not the spiritual meaning of Holy Writ by material interpretations, nor lose the invincible process and purity of Christianity whereby the sick are healed and sinners saved. The Science of Christianity is not generally understood, but it hastens hourly to this end. This Science is the essence of religion, distilled in the laboratory of infinite Love and prepared for all peoples. And because Science is naturally divine, is this natural Science less profitable or scientific than “counting the legs of insects”? The Scripture declares that God is All. Then all is Spirit and spiritual. The true sense of life is lost to those who regard being as material. The Scripture pronounces all that God made “good;” therefore if evil exists, it exists without God. But this is impossible in reality, for He made all “that was made.” Hence the inevitable revelation of Christian Science — that evil is unreal; and this is the best of it.

On April 15, 1891, the Christian Science textbook lay on a table in a burning building. A Christian Scientist entered the house through a window and snatched this book from the flames. Instantly the table sank a charred mass. The covers of the book were burned up, but not one word in the book was effaced. If the world were in ashes, the contents of “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” would remain immortal.

It is said that the nearest approach to the sayings of the great Master is the Logia of Papias, written in 145, and that all else reported as his sayings are translations. The ancient Logia, or imputed sayings of Jesus