Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/76

48 and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”

Not until nineteen centuries had passed was there one ready to receive the inspiration, to restore to human consciousness the stone that had been rejected, and which Mrs. Eddy made “the head of the corner” of The Church of Christ, Scientist.

With the reading of her textbook, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” Mrs. Eddy insisted that her students make, every day, a prayerful study of the Bible, and obtain the spiritual understanding of its promises. Upon this she founded the future growth of her church, and twenty-six years later the following splendid appreciation of her efforts appeared in the Methodist Review from the pen of the late Frederick Lawrence Knowles: —

“Mrs. Eddy. . . in her insistence upon the constant daily reading of the Bible and her own writings,. . . has given to her disciples a means of spiritual development which. . . will certainly build such truth as they do gain into the marrow of their characters. The scorn of the gross and sensual, and the subordination of merely material to spiritual values, together with the discouragement of care and worry, are all forces that make for righteousness. And they are burned indelibly upon the mind of the neophyte every day through its reading. The intellects of these people are not drugged by scandal, drowned in frivolity, or paralyzed by sentimental fiction. . . . They feed the higher nature through the mind, and I am bound as an observer of them to say, in all fairness, that the result is already manifest in their faces, their conversation,