Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/312

268 out error. The uselessness of drugs, the emptiness of knowledge that puffeth up, and the imaginary laws of matter are very apparent to those who are rising to the more glorious demonstration of their God-being.

The mistake the disciples of Jesus made to found religious organisations and church rites, if indeed they did this, was one the Master did not make; but the mistake church members make to employ drugs to heal the sick, was not made by the students of Jesus. Christ's church was Truth, "I am Truth and Life," the temple for the worshippers of Truth is Spirit and not matter. . ..

No time was lost by our Master in organisations, rites, and ceremonies, or in proselyting for certain forms of belief.

The very fact, however, that Christian Science was irreconcilable with the doctrines of any of the established churches must have suggested that it should have an organisation of its own. A belief which presented a new theory of the Godhead, of sin and the atonement, which declared that petitions to a personal Deity could not obtain for man truth, life, or love, needed an organisation behind it if it were to be successfully propagated. Mrs. Eddy's most useful and effective students had been active in church work before they came into Christian Science. They missed their old church associations and wanted a church to work for. They believed that their new faith was a revival of the apostolic method of healing, a new growth from the original root of Christianity, and it was as a religion, rather than a philosophy, that they liked to regard it. While most of these students had first allied themselves with Christian Science chiefly because they wished to heal or to be healed, a mere scheme of therapeutics, even metaphysical therapeutics, was too deficient in sentiment to hold them together and fire them with the zeal which the cause demanded. Mrs. Eddy began to realise this and to see that the time had come to