say that to his mind mental healing is unreasonable because beyond his comprehension, when it is evident that the same person would be unutterably confused in an effort to determine why a pellet or powder or lotion had wrought a cure in any case? Surely, it is the extreme of inconsistency for any man to pride himself upon his wisdom in accepting as a basis of action the result of experiment in the medicine of man, if he rejects like tests respecting the medicine of God.

From what I have said it must appear to the common understanding that Christian Science, as a medicinal agent, is established by all the tests applied to material medicine and fortified by the relentless logic of success.

Christian Science a Religion.

I address myself to all thinking people who regard Mind as master of matter; who recognize an infinite Intelligence as All Cause the Principle that created and governs all things; the supreme Good whom men call God, revealed in the Scriptures as the object of our love, worship, and adoration, and of whom Jesus Christ said, "God is a Spirit; and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." I thus address myself because the recognition of the supremacy of Spirit, Mind, God, is the basis, the inspiration, the soul of Christian Science.

It follows that, in our thought, Christian Science is a religion pure and simple; the religion of the Bible without prefix or suffix; the gentle, beautiful, hopeful religion of love that Jesus preached and taught and practised. If God is Spirit, infinite in goodness, mercy, truth, and love, then it is not difficult to understand (in fact we cannot avoid the conclusion) that He is the only God, the only Spirit, the only Good, Truth, and Love, the first and only Cause, the Principle of all that is. If God is all, then, of course, He is everywhere present; always with us; "a circle, the center of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere." With this concept of God, we can easily understand how He is in absolute

reality "our Strength and our Redeemer," in Whom literally "we live and move and have our being." And we may easily know also that man-God's man-is not a mold of clay, a fashion of matter, but is spiritual: the image and likeness of Spirit, the reflection of God, and hence abides in health, truth, eternal life.

The Christian world has for centuries asserted the belief that a knowledge of God is the beginning of wisdom. Certainly God intended that man should know Him; the Scriptures were given that man might know Him, and thus have eternal life; and eternal life includes eternal health, hope, harmony.

We can never reach a knowledge of God through human understanding; human philosophy cannot compass Him. God is Spirit, and by spiritual understanding alone may be apprehended. We make the knowledge of God difficult by vain attempts to describe Him. The only mystery of godliness is born of the incessant struggle of the finite to measure the Infinite. If, in absolute verity, we did accept God as Spirit, Mind, Principle, instead of attempting to fashion Him with form and parts, with passions and pride, with limitations of beginning and end, then we might easily know Him and thus have life as limitless as His.

The striking distinction between the conclusions of the human senses and of Christian Science respecting God, is the difference between an atom and the universe-between the finite and the Infinite. The former reduces God to the semblance of man; the latter elevates man to the image and likeness of God. The primal principle of Christian Science is the Infinity of God. This basic principle of our religion no one in the old churches, I am sure, will presume to question; for, in all generations back to the very morning of religious thought, men have been taught the infinite power and mercy and goodness of God; and these annul the claims, over man, of evil, sickness, or sin, which would countervail the majesty of Infinite Good. Every Christian organization in the world teaches the power and willingness of God to heal the sick; hence, Christian Scien

tists are not pcculiar in this. The difference between Christian Scientists and the people of the old churches is one of trustfaith. Christian Scientists rely upon their belief in God's healing power; they practise their belief; in the love of God and men, they lay their hands on the sick and the sick recover; and thus Christian Scientists prove their belief by the test Jesus gave and the only test by which Christian belief can be measured.

Christian Scientists are simply trying to live the life and do the works that Jesus lived and did. His mission was not only to preach the gospel but to heal the sick. This was the prophecy of Isaiah concerning him, a prophecy that Jesus declared fulfilled by his presence on the earth. The declaration of Jesus to his disciples, "The works that I do ye shall do also," was made to the people of this day as certainly as it was to the apostles and the people among whom they wrought; and Christian Scientists have demonstrated that they were included in this declaration of the Master by accomplishing many of the marvelous works that Jesus did.

It must not be understood that Christian Scientists heal or pretend to heal the sick by virtue of any power of their own, but only by virtue of the power of God. They do ungrudgingly all that Jesus gave them to do, and rely unfalteringly upon all the promises he made. They believe, too, in the inexorable law: "With what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again;" that you cannot enthrone human reason without in the same measure dethroning God; that if you give shadow for substance, you will receive the bitterness of hollow seeming for abiding reality.

With the Holy Scriptures as their guide to eternal life, and the great Master as their Teacher and Exemplar, Christian Scientists hold, with much force of reason, that theirs is the religion that Jesus established, taught, and practised.

The pathway of Christian Science has not been smooth and carpeted with flowers; thorns and crosses have everywhere beset it, as long ago they stung and held in crucifixion the sweet Herald of "peace on earth." Christian Science meets to-day,

and for thirty years has met, the ecclesiastical antagonism that every new phase of religion or new thought of God has been compelled to encounter; but sooner or later, in God's own good time, the cloud will break and, crowned and glorified, the truth will be seen, like a star, "dwelling apart" in its own gloryalways its own.

We do not complain in bitterness of the opposition that Christian Science has met. It has been simply the assertion of inherited beliefs that has for centuries antagonized every new thought of God. Our fathers endured this before us, and their fathers before them; yet the world has constantly grown brighter and freer and better. It is our duty to add to the good that came to us from the generations gone, and to it all our children will add still other good, born of the greater light of their own day; until, by and by-free from superstition and superior to fear-"the mystery of godliness" will be lost in the sweet simplicity of perfect love.

Intellectual integrity is not easily attained. We must, though ever so reluctantly, concede the fact that, while it is comparatively easy to appear honest with our neighbors, it is extremely difficult to know that we are honest with ourselves. In some to-morrow we will recognize the incomparable deception practised by men upon themselves in the vain effort to find a logic of saying more potent than the logic of doing.

Christian Science is not a religion of beliefs, but of works; not of theories, but of demonstrations. There is nothing concerning which people so persistently deceive themselves as about their religious beliefs. It is so much easier to say than to do; and then one cannot know what he believes, in the sense in which Jesus used that word, except by what he does. Belief is more than intellectual conviction; it includes the elements of trust, faith, reliance: hence the repeated assurance of Jesus, "by their works ye shall know them."

What a man says he believes is not infrequently the very antipodes of what he really believes; for instance, if a man says he believes that "in God we live and move and have our being," and then resorts to a druggist, doctor, or climate for life and

health, you will know at once that he has mistaken his belief. Jesus came recognizing God as the healer of all our diseasesas our life, strength, and redeemer; and, knowing this, by the power of God he healed the sick, bound up the broken-hearted, gave hope for despair, song for anguish, life for death; and these were the works of the Master, the beautiful works by which Jesus the Christ demonstrated his own divinity and the power of God to heal the sick.

In the resplendent glow of this dawning century, rich in the accumulated good of all the past and richer far in the promise of good with which its high noon will bless the world, may we not, in the grace of lofty Christian manhood, make our grateful acknowledgments to Mrs. Eddy for the wonderful contribution that she has made to the joy, song, and redemption of the world? WILLIAM G. EWING. Chicago, Ill.

II. WHAT THE NEW THOUGHT STANDS FOR.

WITHIN

'ITHIN the last twenty-five years two great movements, thoroughly idealistic in their tendencies, have taken root in our own country and are now spreading to the uttermost parts of the earth. One is known under the name of Christian Science, and was founded by Mary Baker Glover Eddy; the other, which is now popularly known as the New Thought Movement, had as its first great apostle P. P. Quimby, of Portland, Me., and later Julius A. Dresser, of Boston, and Dr. W. F. Evans. Mr. Dresser taught and practised mental healing, and wrote but little. Dr. Evans wrote a number of books, the most important being "Primitive Mind Cure” and "Esoteric Christianity."

It is not within the scope of this article to trace the history of these two great movements, but rather to show certain points wherein they agree or disagree. Fundamentally, there are certain beliefs held by them in common. The New Thought devotee as well as the Christian Scientist holds to the thought of the oneness of life-that all life is one life; that all knowledge is one-and that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and