CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. A term given by Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, of Concord. N. IT,. to a religio-scientific discovery which she declares to have been made by her in the year 1866.
It purports to reveal the science of God, and to declare the actual truth about Deity: also the science of life and of man, both of which have been regarded as a mystery. It professes to be the science of the divine Mind, or Omnis cience, and the sciftre of Jesus' mission and teaching—the science of Christianity.
Christian Science affirms the divine individu ality or infinite spiritual personality of God, and denies all man-made conception: of 11 im as a finite personality of anthropomorphic nature or presence. It declares that hid can only he sidritually or supersensibly discerned, and that the so-called material senses cannot cognize or comprehend God. In defining God, according to Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy adds to the gen erally accepted synonyms for Deity, such as Life, Tnith, Love, and Spirit, the further declaration that God is the Divine Principle of all true being, meaning thereby that Ile is the creative prin ciple, the cause, origin, source, basis, foundation. government, and law of all that has actual and permanent existence. She also declares that God is Substame, meaning thereby that :spirit, Mind, is the only actual, immortal sol)stanee or reality. In defining God as Good, she holds that the divine consciousness includes only the con sciousness of good. She repudiates all assump tion that God has created or consented to any form of evil, sin, sickness, or death, or that the fundamental law of being provides for the in ception and continuance of sickness. She de clares that all of God's laws mean and provide for life, and life only.
Christian Science purports to solve the mys tery of evil. It denies the personality of evil as devil, and avers that evil has no real entity or immortality. Sin or evil is a negation—a wrong sense of the truth of being—a wrong sense of that which is eternally right. Christian
Science denies the supposed naturalness of sin, sickness and death, and declares them to be abnormities or monstrosities of the 'carnal mind,' or 'mortal mind,' as it is termed in Christian Science—the paraphernalia of an ignorant and depraved sense of existence which can be mas tered and lawfully abolished.
Christian Science acknowledges the Messiah ship of the divine Christ as the manifested me diatorial link between sinning and suffering mor tals and the divine Love, God. It declares that Jesus exhibited and taught the power of God to heal and to save, and that Jesus' works, instead of being unnatural and in contravention of law, were divinely natural, scientific, and in demon stration of divine order. It claims to remove the entire ministry of Christ from the realm of impenetrable mystery, and to present it as a lawful manifestation of the divine immanence— as the availability and adaptabilit' of the truth or science of being. it pronounces sin and sick ness the works of the devil, which Jesus came to destroy, and declares that salvation through Christ, which He demonstrated, naturally in cludes the healing of the sick as well as the reformation of the sinner.
In reference to the cure of disease, it asserts that the cause of sickness is to be found in the mental realm. It declares that fear, sin, superstition. ignorance, and a depraved, erro neous, fatal philosophy constitute the primal cause of bodily degradation and depletion and have involved the human race in mortality, and the statement is made prophetically that when the world fully learns this fact, it will, for the first time, begin to cope scientifically with and permanently master disease. It declares as a scientific postulate that 'all manner of diseases' are curable and that the practice of Christian Science is attesting this statement by healing all of the diseases heretofore regarded as incur able, such as malignant cancers, ete.