No person can accept another's belief, except it be with the consent of his own belief. If the error which knocks at the door of your own thought originated in another's mind, you are a free moral agent to reject or to accept this error; hence, you are the arbiter of your own fate, and sin is the author of sin. In the words of our Master, you are “a liar, and the father of it [the lie].”
Why did Jesus call himself “the Son of man”?
In the life of our Lord, meekness was as conspicuous as might. In John xvii. he declared his sonship with God: “These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify Thy. Son, that Thy Son also may glorify Thee.” The hour had come for the avowal of this great truth, and for the proof of his eternal Life and sonship. Jesus' wisdom ofttimes was shown by his forbearing to speak, as well as by speaking, the whole truth. Haply he waited for a preparation of the human heart to receive startling announcements. This wisdom, which characterized his sayings, did not prophesy his death, and thereby hasten or permit it.
The disciples and prophets thrust disputed points on minds unprepared for them. This cost them their lives, and the world's temporary esteem; but the prophecies were fulfilled, and their motives were rewarded by growth and more spiritual understanding, which dawns by degrees on mortals. The spiritual Christ was infallible; Jesus, as material manhood, was not Christ. The “man of sorrows” knew that the man of joys, his spiritual self, or Christ, was the Son of God; and that the mortal mind, not the immortal Mind, suffered. The human manifestation of the Son of God was called the Son of man, or Mary's son.
Please explain Paul's meaning in the text, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
The Science of Life, overshadowing Paul's sense of life in matter, so far extinguished the latter as forever to quench his love for it. The discipline of the flesh is designed to turn one, like a weary traveller, to the home of Love. To lose error thus, is to live in Christ, Truth. A true sense of the falsity of material joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, takes them away, and teaches Life's lessons aright. The transition from our lower sense of Life to a new and higher sense thereof, even though it be through the door named death, yields a clearer and nearer sense of Life to those who have utilized the present, and are ripe for the harvest-home. To the battle-worn and weary Christian hero, Life eternal brings blessings.
Is a Christian Scientist ever sick, and has he who is sick been regenerated?
The Christian Scientist learns spiritually all that he knows of Life, and demonstrates what he understands. God is recognized as the divine Principle of his being, and of every thought and act leading to good. His purpose must be right, though his power is temporarily limited. Perfection, the goal of existence, is not won in a moment; and regeneration leading thereto is gradual, for it culminates in the fulfilment of this divine rule in Science: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”
The last degree of regeneration rises into the rest of perpetual, spiritual, individual existence. The first feeble flutterings of mortals Christward are infantile and more or less imperfect. The new-born Christian Scientist must mature, and work out his own salvation. Spirit and flesh antagonize. Temptation, that mist of mortal mind which seems to be matter and the environment of mortals, suggests pleasure and pain in matter; and, so long as this temptation lasts, the warfare is not ended and the mortal is not regenerated. The pleasures—more than the pains—of sense, retard regeneration; for pain compels human consciousness to escape from sense into the immortality and harmony of Soul. Disease in error, more than ease in it, tends to destroy error: the sick often are thereby led to Christ, Truth, and to learn their way out of both sickness and sin.
The material and physical are imperfect. The individual and spiritual are perfect; these have no fleshly nature. This final degree of regeneration is saving, and the Christian will, must, attain it; but it doth not yet appear. Until this be attained, the Christian Scientist must continue to strive with sickness, sin, and death—though in lessening degrees—and manifest growth at every experience.
Is it correct to say of material objects, that they are nothing and exist only in imagination?
Nothing and something are words which need correct definition. They either mean formations of indefinite and vague human opinions, or scientific classifications of the unreal and the real. My sense of the beauty of the universe is, that beauty typifies holiness, and is something to be desired. Earth is more spiritually beautiful to my gaze now than when it was more earthly to the eyes of Eve. The pleasant sensations of human belief, of form and color, must be spiritualized, until we gain the glorified sense of substance as in the new heaven and earth, the harmony of body and Mind.
Even the human conception of beauty, grandeur, and utility is something that defies a sneer. It is more than imagination. It is next to divine beauty and the grandeur of Spirit. It lives with our earth-life, and is the subjective state of high thoughts. The atmosphere of mortal mind constitutes our mortal environment. What mortals hear, see, feel, taste, smell, constitutes their present earth and heaven: but we must grow out of even this pleasing thraldom, and find wings to reach the glory of supersensible Life; then we shall soar above, as the bird in the clear ether of the blue temporal sky.
To take all earth's beauty into one gulp of vacuity and label beauty nothing, is ignorantly to caricature God's creation, which is unjust to human sense and to the divine realism. In our immature sense of spiritual things, let us say of the beauties of the sensuous universe: “I love your promise; and shall know, some time, the spiritual reality and substance of form, light, and color, of what I now through you discern dimly; and knowing this, I shall be satisfied. Matter is a frail conception of mortal mind; and mortal mind is a poorer representative of the beauty, grandeur, and glory of the immortal Mind.”
Please inform us, through your Journal, if you sent Mrs. ——to——. She said that you sent her there to look after the students; and also, that no one there was working in Science—which is certainly a mistake.
I never commission any one to teach students of mine. After class teaching, he does best in the investigation of Christian Science who is most reliant on himself and God. My students are taught the divine Principle and rules of the Science of Mind-healing. What they need thereafter is to study thoroughly the Scriptures and “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.” To watch and pray, to be honest, earnest, loving, and truthful, is indispensable to the demonstration of the truth they have been taught.
If they are haunted by obsequious helpers, who, uncalled for, imagine they can help anybody and steady God's altar—this interference prolongs the struggle and tends to blight the fruits of my students. A faithful student may even sometimes feel the need of physical help, and occasionally receive it from others; but the less this is required, the better it is for that student.
Please give us, through your Journal, the name of the author of that genuine critique in the September number, “What Quibus Thinks.”
I am pleased to inform this inquirer, that the author of the article in question is a Boston gentleman whose thought is appreciated by many liberals. Patience, observation, intellectual culture, reading, writing, extensive travel, and twenty years in the pulpit, have equipped him as a critic who knows whereof he speaks. His allusion to Christian Science in the following paragraph, glows in the shadow of darkling criticism like a midnight sun. Its manly honesty follows like a benediction after prayer, and closes the task of talking to deaf ears and dull debaters.
“We have always insisted that this Science is natural, spiritually natural; that Jesus was the highest type of real nature; that Christian healing is supernatural, or extra-natural, only to those who do not enter into its sublimity or understand its modes—as