Trustees under the Will of Mary
Baker G. Eddy
Boston, U.S.A.
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TEXT:
One Lord, one faith, one baptism. - EPHESIANS iv. 5
EVERY step of
progress is a step more spiritual. The |
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great element of reform is not born of
human wis-
dom; it draws not its life from human organizations;
rather
is it the crumbling away of material elements from |
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reason, the translation of law back to its
original language,
- Mind, and the final unity between man and God.
The
footsteps of thought, as they pass from the sensual |
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side of existence to the reality and Soul
of all things, are
slow, portending a long night to the traveller; but
the
guardians of the gloom are the angels of His presence, that |
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impart grandeur to the intellectual
wrestling and colli-
sions with old-time faiths, as we drift into more
spiritual
latitudes. The beatings of our heart can be heard; but |
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the ceaseless throbbings and throes of
thought are unheard,
as it changes from material to spiritual standpoints.
Even
the pangs of death disappear, accordingly as the under- |
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standing that we are spiritual beings here
reappears, and
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we learn our capabilities for good, which
insures man's
continuance and is the true glory of immortality.
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The improved theory and practice of
religion and of
medicine are mainly due to the people's improved views
of the Supreme Being. As the finite sense of Deity, based |
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on material conceptions of spiritual being,
yields its grosser
elements, we shall learn what God is, and what God
does.
The Hebrew term that gives another letter to the word |
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God and makes it good, unites
Science and Christianity,
whereby we learn that God, good, is
universal, and the
divine Principle, - Life, Truth, Love; and this
Principle is |
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learned through goodness, and of Mind
instead of matter,
of Soul instead of the senses, and by revelation
supporting
reason. It is the false conceptions of Spirit, based on the |
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evidences gained from the material senses,
that make a
Christian only in theory, shockingly material in practice,
and form its Deity out of the worst human qualities, else |
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of wood or stone.
Such a theory has
overturned empires in demoniacal con-
tests over religion. Proportionately
as the people's belief |
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of God, in every age, has been
dematerialized and unfinited
has their Deity become good; no longer a
personal tyrant
or a molten image, but the divine Life, Truth, and
Love, |
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- Life without beginning or ending, Truth
without a
lapse or error, and Love universal, infinite, eternal. This
more perfect idea, held constantly before the people's |
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mind, must have a benign and elevating
influence upon
the character of nations as well as individuals, and
will
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lift man ultimately to the understanding
that our ideals
form our characters, that as a man "thinketh in his
heart, |
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so is he." The crudest ideals of
speculative theology
have made monsters of men; and the ideals of
materia
medica have made helpless invalids and cripples. The |
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eternal roasting amidst noxious vapors; the
election of the
minority to be saved and the majority to be eternally
pun-
ished; the wrath of God, to be appeased by the sacrifice |
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and torture of His favorite Son, - are some
of the false
beliefs that have produced sin, sickness, and death; and
then would affirm that these are natural, and that Chris- |
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tianity and Christ-healing are
preternatural; yea, that
make a mysterious God and a natural devil.
Let us rejoice that
the bow of omnipotence already |
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spans the moral heavens with light, and
that the more
spiritual idea of good and Truth meets the old material
thought like a promise upon the cloud, while it inscribes |
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on the thoughts of men at this period a
more metaphysical
religion founded upon Christian Science. A personal
God is based on finite premises, where thought begins |
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wrongly to apprehend the infinite, even the
quality or the
quantity of eternal good. This limited sense of God as
good limits human thought and action in their goodness, |
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and assigns them mortal fetters in the
outset. It has im-
planted in our religions certain unspiritual shifts,
such as
dependence on personal pardon for salvation, rather than |
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obedience to our Father's demands, whereby
we grow out
of sin in the way that our Lord has appointed; namely,
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by working out our own salvation. It has
given to all
systems of materia medica nothing but materialism,
- |
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more faith in hygiene and drugs than in
God. Idolatry
sprang from the belief that God is a form, more than an
infinite and divine Mind; sin, sickness, and death origi- |
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nated in the belief that Spirit
materialized into a body,
infinity became finity, or man, and the eternal
entered the
temporal. Mythology, or the myth of ologies, said that |
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Life, which is infinite and eternal, could
enter finite man
through his nostrils, and matter become intelligent of
good and evil, because a serpent said it. When first good, |
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God, was named a person, and evil another
person, the
error that a personal God and a personal devil entered
into
partnership and would form a third person, called |
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material man, obtained expression. But
these unspirit-
ual and mysterious ideas of God and man are far from
correct.
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The glorious Godhead is Life, Truth, and
Love, and
these three terms for one divine Principle are the three in
one that can be understood, and that find no reflection in |
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sinning, sick, and dying mortals. No
miracle of grace can
make a spiritual mind out of beliefs that are as
material as
the heathen deities. The pagan priests appointed Apollo |
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and Esculapius the gods of medicine, and
they inquired of
these heathen deities what drugs to prescribe. Systems
of religion and of medicine grown out of such false ideals |
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of the Supreme Being cannot heal the sick
and cast out
devils, error. Eschewing a materialistic and idolatrous
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theory and practice of medicine and
religion, the apostle
devoutly recommends the more spiritual Christianity,
- |
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"one Lord, one faith, one baptism." The
prophets and
apostles, whose lives are the embodiment of a living
faith,
have not taken away our Lord, that we know not where they |
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have laid him; they have resurrected a
deathless life of
love; and into the cold materialisms of dogma and
doctrine
we look in vain for their more spiritual ideal, the risen |
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Christ, whose materia medica and
theology were one.
The ideals of
primitive Christianity are nigh, even at
our door. Truth is not lost in the
mists of remoteness or |
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the barbarisms of spiritless codes. The
right ideal is not
buried, but has risen higher to our mortal sense,
and
having overcome death and the grave, wrapped in a pure |
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winding-sheet, it sitteth beside the
sepulchre in angel
form, saying unto us, "Life is God; and our ideal of God
has risen above the sod to declare His omnipotence." This |
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white-robed thought points away from matter
and doc-
trine, or dogma, to the diviner sense of Life and Love, -
yea,
to the Principle that is God, and to the demonstra- |
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tion thereof in healing the sick. Let us
then heed this heav-
enly visitant, and not entertain the angel
unawares.
The ego is not
self-existent matter animated by mind, |
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but in itself is mind; therefore a
Truth-filled mind makes
a pure Christianity and a healthy mind and body.
Oliver
Wendell Holmes said, in a lecture before the Harvard |
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Medical School: "I firmly believe that if
the whole materia
medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it
would be
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all the better for mankind and all the
worse for the fishes."
Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse writes: "I am sick of
learned |
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quackery." Dr. Abercrombie, Fellow of the
Royal Col-
lege of Physicians in Edinburgh, writes: "Medicine is the
science of guessing." Dr. James Johnson, Surgeon Ex- |
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traordinary to the King, says: "I declare
my conscientious
belief, founded on long observation and reflection,
that
if there was not a single physician, surgeon, apothecary, |
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man-midwife, chemist, druggist, or drug on
the face of
the earth, there would be less sickness and less mortality
than now obtains." Voltaire says: "The art of medicine |
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consists in amusing the patient while
nature cures the
disease."
Believing that man
is the victim of his Maker, we natu- |
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rally fear God more than we love Him;
whereas "perfect
Love casteth out fear;" but when we learn God aright, we
love Him, because He is found altogether lovely. Thus it |
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is that a more spiritual and true ideal of
Deity improves
the race physically and spiritually. God is no longer a
mystery to the Christian Scientist, but a divine Principle, |
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understood in part, because the grand
realities of Life and
Truth are found destroying sin, sickness, and death;
and
it should no longer be deemed treason to understand God, |
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when the Scriptures enjoin us to "acquaint
now thyself
with Him [God], and be at peace;" we should understand
something of that great good for which we are to leave all |
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else.
Periods and peoples
are characterized by their highest
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or their lowest ideals, by their God and
their devil. We are
all sculptors, working out our own ideals, and leaving
the |
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impress of mind on the body as well as on
history and
marble, chiselling to higher excellence, or leaving to rot and
ruin the mind's ideals. Recognizing this as we ought, we |
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shall turn often from marble to model,
from matter to
Mind, to beautify and exalt our lives.
"Chisel in
hand stood a sculptor-boy, |
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With his
marble block before him;
And his face lit up with a smile of joy
As an
angel dream passed o'er him. |
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He carved
the dream on that shapeless stone
With many a sharp incision.
With
heaven's own light the sculptor shone, - |
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He had
caught the angel-vision.
"Sculptors of life are we as we stand
With our lives uncarved before us, |
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Waiting the
hour when at God's command
Our life dream passes o'er us.
If we carve
it then on the yielding stone |
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With many a
sharp incision,
Its heavenly beauty shall be our own, -
Our lives that
angel-vision."
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To remove those objects of sense called
sickness and dis-
ease, we must appeal to mind to improve its subjects
and
objects of thought, and give to the body those better de- |
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lineations. Scientific discovery and the
inspiration of
Truth have taught me that the health and character of
man become more or less perfect as his mind-models are |
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more or less spiritual. Because God is
Spirit, our thoughts
must spiritualize to approach Him, and our methods
grow
more spiritual to accord with our thoughts. Religion and
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medicine must be dematerialized to present
the right idea
of Truth; then will this idea cast out error and heal
the |
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sick. If changeableness that repenteth
itself; partiality
that elects some to be saved and others to be lost, or
that
answers the prayer of one and not of another; if incom- |
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petency that cannot heal the sick, or lack
of love that will
not; if unmercifulness, that for the sins of a few
tired
years punishes man eternally, - are our conceptions of |
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Deity, we shall bring out these qualities
of character in our
own lives and extend their influence to others.
Judaism, enjoining
the limited and definite form of a |
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national religion, was not more the
antithesis of Chris-
tianity than are our finite and material conceptions
of
Deity. Life is God; but we say that Life is carried on |
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through principal processes, and speculate
concerning
material forces. Mind is supreme; and yet we make more
of
matter, and lean upon it for health and life. Mind, |
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that governs the universe, governs every
action of the body
as directly as it moves a planet and controls the
muscles
of the arm. God grant that the trembling chords of human |
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hope shall again be swept by the divine
Talitha cumi,
"Damsel, I say unto thee, arise." Then shall Christian
Science again appear, to light our sepulchres with im- |
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mortality. We thank our Father that to-day
the uncre-
mated fossils of material systems, already charred, are
fast
fading into ashes; and that man will ere long stop |
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trusting where there is no trust, and
gorging his faith with
skill proved a million times unskilful.
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Christian Science has one faith, one Lord,
one baptism;
and this faith builds on Spirit, not matter; and this
bap- |
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tism is the purification of mind, - not an
ablution of the
body, but tears of repentance, an overflowing love,
wash-
ing away the motives for sin; yea, it is love leaving self |
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for God. The cool bath may refresh the
body, or as com-
pliance with a religious rite may declare one's belief;
but
it cannot purify his mind, or meet the demands of Love. |
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It is the baptism of Spirit that washes our
robes and makes
them white in the blood of the Lamb; that bathes us in
the
life of Truth and the truth of Life. Having one Lord, we |
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shall not be idolaters, dividing our homage
and obedience
between matter and Spirit; but shall work out our own
salvation, after the model of our Father, who never par- |
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dons the sin that deserves to be punished
and can be de-
stroyed only through suffering.
We ask and receive
not, because we "ask amiss;" even |
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dare to invoke the divine aid of Spirit to
heal the sick, and
then administer drugs with full confidence in their
efficacy,
showing our greater faith in matter, despite the authority |
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of Jesus that "ye cannot serve two
masters."
Silent prayer is a
desire, fervent, importunate: here
metaphysics is seen to rise above
physics, and rest all faith |
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in Spirit, and remove all evidence of any
other power than
Mind; whereby we learn the great fact that there is
no
omnipotence, unless omnipotence is the All-power. This |
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truth of Deity, understood, destroys
discord with the higher
and more potent evidences in Christian Science of
man's
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harmony and immortality. Thought is the
essence of an
act, and the stronger element of action; even as steam
is |
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more powerful than water, simply because it
is more
ethereal. Essences are refinements that lose some materi-
ality; and as we struggle through the cold night of physics, |
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matter will become vague, and melt into
nothing under the
microscope of Mind.
Massachusetts
succored a fugitive slave in 1853, and put |
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her humane foot on a tyrannical prohibitory
law regulating
the practice of medicine in 1880. It were well if the
sister
States had followed her example and sustained as nobly |
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our constitutional Bill of Rights.
Discerning the God-
given rights of man, Paul said, "I was free born."
Justice
and truth make man free, injustice and error enslave |
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him. Mental Science alone grasps the
standard of liberty,
and battles for man's whole rights, divine as well as
hu-
man. It assures us, of a verity, that mortal beliefs, and |
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not a law of nature, have made men sinning
and sick, -
that they alone have fettered free limbs, and marred in
mind the model of man.
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We possess our own body, and make it
harmonious or
discordant according to the images that thought reflects
upon it. The emancipation of our bodies from sickness |
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will follow the mind's freedom from sin;
and, as St. Paul
admonishes, we should be "waiting for the adoption, to
wit, the redemption of our body." The rights of man were |
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vindicated but in a single instance when
African slavery
was abolished on this continent, yet that hour was a
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prophecy of the full liberty of the sons of
God as found in
Christian Science. The defenders of the rights of the |
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colored man were scarcely done with their
battles before a
new abolitionist struck the keynote of higher claims,
in
which it was found that the feeblest mind, enlightened |
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and spiritualized, can free its body from
disease as well as
sin; and this victory is achieved, not with bayonet
and
blood, not by inhuman warfare, but in divine peace.
|
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Above the platform of human rights let us
build another
staging for diviner claims, - even the supremacy of Soul
over sense, wherein man cooperates with and is made sub- |
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ject to his Maker. The lame, the blind, the
sick, the sen-
sual, are slaves, and their fetters are gnawing away
life
and hope; their chains are clasped by the false teachings, |
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false theories, false fears, that enforce
new forms of op-
pression, and are the modern Pharaohs that hold the
chil-
dren of Israel still in bondage. Mortals, alias mortal |
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minds, make the laws that govern their
bodies, as directly
as men pass legislative acts and enact penal codes;
while
the body, obedient to the legislation of mind, but ignorant |
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of the law of belief, calls its own
enactments "laws of
matter." The legislators who are greatly responsible
for
all the woes of mankind are those leaders of public thought |
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who are mistaken in their methods of
humanity.
The learned quacks
of this period "bind heavy bur-
dens," that they themselves will not touch
"with one of |
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their fingers." Scientific guessing
conspires unwittingly
against the liberty and lives of men. Should we
but
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hearken to the higher law of God, we should
think for one
moment of these divine statutes of God: Let them have |
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"dominion over all the earth." "And if they
drink any
deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands
on
the sick, and they shall recover." The only law of sick- |
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ness or death is a law of mortal belief, an
infringement
on the merciful and just government of God. When this
great fact is understood, the spurious, imaginary laws of |
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matter - when matter is not a lawgiver -
will be dis-
puted and trampled under the feet of Truth. Deal, then,
with this fabulous law as with an inhuman State law; re- |
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peal it in mind, and acknowledge only God
in all thy ways,
- "who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all
thy
diseases." Few there be who know what a power mind is |
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to heal when imbued with the spiritual
truth that lifts man
above the demands of matter.
As our ideas of
Deity advance to truer conceptions, |
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we shall take in the remaining two thirds
of God's plan
of redemption, - namely, man's salvation from sickness
and death. Our blessed Master demonstrated this great |
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truth of healing the sick and raising the
dead as God's
whole plan, and proved the application of its Principle
to
human wants. Having faith in drugs and hygienic drills, |
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we lose faith in omnipotence, and give the
healing power
to matter instead of Spirit. As if Deity would not if He
could, or could not if He would, give health to man; when |
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our Father bestows heaven not more
willingly than health;
for without health there could be no heaven.
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The worshippers of wood and stone have a
more mate-
rial deity, hence a lower order of humanity, than those |
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who believe that God is a personal Spirit.
But the wor-
shippers of a person have a lower order of Christianity
than
he who understands that the Divine Being is more than a |
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person, and can demonstrate in part this
great impersonal
Life, Truth, and Love, casting out error and healing
the
sick. This all-important understanding is gained in |
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Christian Science, revealing the one God
and His all-
power and ever-presence, and the brotherhood of man in
unity of Mind and oneness of Principle.
|
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On the startled ear of humanity rings out
the iron tread
of merciless invaders, putting man to the rack for his
conscience, or forcing from the lips of manhood shameful |
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confessions, - Galileo kneeling at the feet
of priestcraft,
and giving the lie to science. But the lofty faith of
the
pious Polycarp proved the triumph of mind over the body, |
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when they threatened to let loose the wild
beasts upon him,
and he replied: "Let them come; I cannot change at
once
from good to bad." Then they bound him to the stake, |
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set fire to the fagots, and his pure faith
went up through
the baptism of fire to a higher sense of Life. The
infidel
was blind who said, "Christianity is fit only for women and |
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weak-minded men." But infidels disagree;
for Bonaparte
said: "Since ever the history of Christianity was written,
the loftiest intellects have had a practical faith in God;" |
| 27 |
and Daniel Webster said: "My heart has
assured and re-
assured me that Christianity must be a divine
reality."
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As our ideas of Deity become more
spiritual, we express
them by objects more beautiful. To-day we clothe
our |
| 3 |
thoughts of death with flowers laid upon
the bier, and in
our cemeteries with amaranth blossoms, evergreen
leaves,
fragrant recesses, cool grottos, smiling fountains, and |
| 6 |
white monuments. The dismal gray stones of
church-
yards have crumbled into decay, as our ideas of Life have
grown
more spiritual; and in place of "bat and owl on the |
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bending stones, are wreaths of immortelles,
and white
fingers pointing upward." Thus it is that our ideas of
divinity form our models of humanity. O Christian Scien- |
| 12 |
tist, thou of the church of the new-born;
awake to a
higher and holier love for God and man; put on the whole
armor of Truth; rejoice in hope; be patient in tribulation, |
| 15 |
- that ye may go to the bed of anguish, and
look upon this
dream of life in matter, girt with a higher sense of
omnipo-
tence; and behold once again the power of divine Life and |
| 18 |
Love to heal and reinstate man in God's own
image and
likeness, having "one Lord, one faith, one baptism." |
