Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/170

132 life. She had really walked straight toward this revelation, though seemingly through a backward-turning path. The backward-turning was a part of the marvelous fitting of her nature, the enlightenment of her mind for the immense service later of delineating the counterfeit of spiritual healing and to post the warning signs against the dangers of hypnotism. She herself has written of the discovery:

In the year 1866 I discovered the Christ Science, or divine laws of Life, and named it Christian Science. God had been graciously fitting me, during many years, for the reception of a final revelation of the absolute divine Principle of scientific being and healing.

When apparently near the confines of mortal existence, standing already within the shadow of the death valley, I learned these truths in divine Science: that all real being is in God, the divine Mind, and that Life, Truth, and Love are all-powerful and ever-present; that the opposite of Truth, — called error, sin, sickness, disease, death, — is the false testimony of false material sense — of life in matter; that this false sense evolves, in belief, a subjective state of mortal mind which this same so-called mind names matter, thereby shutting out the true sense of Spirit.

Of the great discoveries in the world’s history it may be well to consider a moment which have blessed the human race most. The discovery of gunpowder and the invention of movable types came in about the same period. The discovery of the use of ether as an anesthetic and the discovery of Mind-Science