Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/208

180 practical, and so furnish rules whereby man can prove God's love, healing the sick and the sinner.

Whosoever understands Christian Science knows beyond a doubt that its life-giving truths were preached and practised in the first century by him who proved their practicality, who uttered Christ's Sermon on the Mount, who taught his disciples the healing Christianity which applies to all ages, and who dated time. A spiritual understanding of the Scriptures restores their original tongue in the language of Spirit, that primordial standard of Truth.

Christian Science contains no element whatever of hypnotism or animal magnetism. It appeals alone to God, to the divine Principle, or Life, Truth, and Love, to whom all things are possible; and this Principle heals sin, sickness, disease, and death. Christian Science meets error with Truth, death with Life, hate with Love, and thus, and only thus, does it overcome evil and heal disease. The obstinate sinner, however, refuses to see this grand verity or to acknowledge it, for he knows not that in justice, as well as in mercy, God is Love.

In our struggles with sin and sinners, when we drop compliance with their desires, insist on what we know is right, and act accordingly, the disguised or the self-satisfied mind, not ready to be uplifted, rebels, misconstrues our best motives, and calls them unkind. But this is the cross. Take it up, — it wins the crown; and in the spirit of our great Exemplar pray: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

No warfare exists between divine theology and Christian Science, for the latter solves the whence and why of the cosmos and defines noumenon and phenomena spiritually,