Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/209

Rh not materially. The specific quest of Christian Science is to settle all points beyond cavil, on the Biblical basis that God is All-in-all; whereas philosophy and so-called natural science, dealing with human hypotheses, or material cause and effect, are aided only at long intervals with elementary truths, and ultimate in unsolved problems and outgrown, proofless positions.

Progress is spiritual. Progress is the maturing conception of divine Love; it demonstrates the scientific, sinless life of man and mortal's painless departure from matter to Spirit, not through death, but through the true idea of Life, — and Life not in matter but in Mind.

The Puritans possessed the motive of true religion, which, demonstrated on the Golden Rule, would have solved ere this the problem of religious liberty and human rights. It is “a consummation devoutly to be wished” that all nations shall speedily learn and practise the intermediate line of justice between the classes and masses of mankind, and thus exemplify in all things the universal equity of Christianity.

Thirty years ago (1866) Christian Science was discovered in America. Within those years it is estimated that Chicago has gained from a population of 238,000 to the number of 1,650,000 inhabitants.

The statistics of mortality show that thirty years ago the death-rate was at its maximum. Since that time it has steadily decreased. It is authentically said that one expositor of Daniel's dates fixed the year 1866 or 1867 for the return of Christ — the return of the spiritual idea to the material earth or antipode of heaven. It is a marked coincidence that those dates were the first two years of my discovery of Christian Science.