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What can we learn from our first glance
at this table of contents? We note that there are eighteen chapters and that
the last four are headed Key to the Scriptures. (There are also seven hundred
pages, so it is a long book.) There is first a PREFACE which introduces us to
the twin points that dominate the book: the fact that God can be understood
aright, and that healing power follows from this understanding.
Chapter I is PRAYER. All our work in
spiritual things naturally begins with prayer. There is the hunger of the human
heart for God, — there is the deep desire to know what reality is, what
substance is. But what are we really praying for? Prayer is sometimes an
earnest request for health or a blessing or for well-being. But when we look
further into this question we realize that what we are fundamentally praying
for is something much deeper: surely it is for our conscious union with God,
with our divine source. Isn't this the basic longing? The Lord's Prayer, common
to us all, begins with the words, Our Father, words that are both comforting
and express the nature of what we are seeking. "Prayer is our acknowledgement
of this desire to be at-one with the divine, with our Parent-source.
The second chapter is ATONEMENT AND
EUCHARIST. The word atonement as used in theology means unity, reconciliation,
and its derivation is literally at one. At-one-ment therefore is not just a
play on words. Some dictionaries even include Mrs Eddy's words, "Atonement is
the exemplification of man's unity with God, whereby man reflects divine Truth,
Life, and Love" (S&H 18:1). But the chapter is called Atonement and
Eucharist, and in this context eucharist focuses on the price we are required
to pay to experience at-one-ment. This price is that we have to give up all
personal sense of a separate self. Jesus' sinless life depicts the surrender of
the mortal sense of a life of one's own; he had no sense of himself as a
separate person called Jesus. His divine identity as the Christ was his whole
being; it demonstrated man reunited with, or reconciled to, God.
Our prayer for the at-one-ment of
humanity with divinity leads us to the third chapter, MARRIAGE. What "God hath
joined together" is the true human and the divine — the manhood and
womanhood of God. Our humanity is found to be in wedlock with our divinity. All
there is to you and me engaged in our righfful activities is the divine
operating as you and me. So there is a beautiful state of marriage, when the
divine is operating not through us but as us.
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Published by
Elmdon
Publications
Elmdon, Saffron Walden, Essex, England
1989
In
association with Christian Science Foundation, England |
