Mary Baker Eddy

“ For “who is so great a God as our God!” unchangeable, all-wise, all-just, all-merciful; the ever-loving, ever-living Life, Truth, Love: comforting such as mourn, opening the prison doors to the captive, marking the unwinged bird, pitying with more than a father's pity; healing the sick, cleansing the leper, raising the dead, saving sinners. As we think thereon, man's true sense is filled with peace, and power; and we say, It is well that Christian Science has taken expressive silence wherein to muse His praise, to kiss the feet of Jesus, adore the white Christ, and stretch out our arms to God. ”

“ Love cannot be a mere abstraction, or goodness without activity and power. As a human quality, the glorious significance of affection is more than words: it is the tender, unselfish deed done in secret; the silent, ceaseless prayer; the self-forgetful heart that overflows; the veiled form stealing on an errand of mercy, out of a side door; the little feet tripping along the sidewalk; the gentle hand opening the door that turns toward want and woe, sickness and sorrow and thus lighting the dark places of earth. ”

“ Falsehood is on the wings of the winds, but Truth will soar above it. Truth is speaking louder, clearer, and more imperatively than ever. Error is walking to and fro in the earth, trying to be heard above Truth, but its voice dies out in the distance. Whosoever proclaims Truth loudest, becomes the mark for error's shafts. The archers aim at Truth's mouthpiece; but a heart loyal to God is patient and strong. Justice waits, and is used to waiting ”

“ Hast thou been driven by suffering to the foot of the mount, but earth-bound, burdened by pride, sin, and self, hast thou turned back, stumbled, and wandered away? Or hast thou tarried in the habitation of the senses, pleased and stupefied, until wakened through the baptism of fire?
He alone ascends the hill of Christian Science who follows the Way-shower, the spiritual presence and idea of God. Whatever obstructs the way, — causing to stumble, fall, or faint, those mortals who are striving to enter the path, — divine Love will remove; and uplift the fallen and strengthen the weak. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Whatever appears to be law, but partakes not of the nature of God, is not law, but is what Jesus declared it, “a liar, and the father of it.” God is the law of Life, not of death; of health, not of sickness; of good, not of evil. It is this infinitude and oneness of good that silences the supposition that evil is a claimant or a claim. The consciousness of good has no consciousness or knowledge of evil; and evil is not a quality to be known or eliminated by good: while iniquity, too evil to conceive of good as being unlike itself, declares that God knows iniquity! ”

“ The reformer works on unmentioned, save when he is abused or his work is utilized in the interest of somebody. He may labor for the establishment of a cause which is fraught with infinite blessings, — health, virtue, and heaven; but what of all that? Who should care for everybody? It is enough, say they, to care for a few. Yet the good done, and the love that foresees more to do, stimulate philanthrophy and are an ever-present reward. Let one's life answer well these questions, and it already hath a benediction:
Have you renounced self? ”

“ In this law of justice, the atonement of Christ loses no efficacy. Justice is the handmaid of mercy, and showeth mercy by punishing sin. Jesus said, “I came not to destroy the law,” — the divine requirements typified in the law of Moses, — “but to fulfil it” in righteousness, by Truth's destroying error. No greater type of divine Love can be presented than effecting so glorious a purpose. This spirit of sacrifice always has saved, and still saves mankind; but by mankind I mean mortals, or a kind of men after man's own making. Man as God's idea is already saved with an everlasting salvation. ”

“ Mind is supreme: Love is the master of hate; Truth, the victor over a lie. Hath not Science voiced this lesson to you, — that evil is powerless, that a lie is never true? It is your province to wrestle with error, to handle the serpent and bruise its head; but you cannot, as a Christian Scientist, resort to stones and clubs, — yea, to matter, — to kill the serpent of a material mind. ”

“ Whenever and wherever a church of Christian Science is established, its pastor is the Bible and my book.
In 1896 it goes without saying, preeminent over ignorance or envy, that Christian Science is founded by its discoverer, and built upon the rock of Christ. The elements of earth beat in vain against the immortal parapets of this Science. Erect and eternal, it will go on with the ages, go down the dim posterns of time unharmed, and on every battle-field rise higher in the estimation of thinkers and in the hearts of Christians. ”

“ In my reflections at that time it seemed to me that life was an incomprehensible enigma; that the creator had placed us on this earth, and left us entirely in the dark as to His purpose in so doing. We seemed to be cast upon the ocean of time, and left to drift aimlessly about, with no exact knowledge of what was required of us or how to attain unto the truth, which must certainly have an existence somewhere. ”

“ As mortals awake from their dream of material sensation, this adorable, all-inclusive God, and all earth's hieroglyphics of Love, are understood; and infinite Mind is seen kindling the stars, rolling the worlds, reflecting all space and Life, — but not life in matter. Wisely governing, informing the universe, this Mind is Truth, — not laws of matter. Infinitely just, merciful, and wise, this Mind is Love, — but not fallible love. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Peace has no foothold on the false basis that evil should be concealed and that life and happiness should still attend it. Joy is self-sustained; goodness and blessedness are one: suffering is self-inflicted, and good is the master of evil.
To this scientific logic and the logic of events, egotism and false charity say, “ ‘Not so, Lord;’ it is wise to cover iniquity and punish it not, then shall mortals have peace.” Divine Love, as unconscious as incapable of error, pursues the evil that hideth itself, strips off its disguises, and — behold the result: evil, uncovered, is self-destroyed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Will you be equally in earnest for the truth? Will you doff your lavender-kid zeal, and become real and consecrated warriors? Will you give yourselves wholly and irrevocably to the great work of establishing the truth, the gospel, and the Science which are necessary to the salvation of the world from error, sin, disease, and death? ”

“ Past, present, future, will show the word and might of Truth — healing the sick and reclaiming the sinner — so long as there remains a claim of error for Truth to deny or to destroy. Love's labors are not lost. The five personal senses, that grasp neither the meaning nor the magnitude of self-abnegation, may lose sight thereof; but Science voices unselfish love, unfolds infinite good, leads on irresistible forces, and will finally show the fruits of Love. Human reason is inaccurate; and the scope of the senses is inadequate to grasp the word of Truth, and teach the eternal. ”

“ I have been reading “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” and feasting — like a starving, shipwrecked mariner, on the food that was to sustain him — on truths which ages to come will appreciate, understand, and accept. Many of the theories which at first appear abstruse and obscure, at length become clear and lucid. The candle of intellect requires occasional snuffing to throw the clear light of penetration on the page. ”

“ Let us open our affections to the Principle that moves all in harmony, — from the falling of a sparrow to the rolling of a world. Above Arcturus and his sons, broader than the solar system and higher than the atmosphere of our planet, is the Science of mental healing.
What is the kingdom of heaven? The abode of Spirit, the realm of the real. No matter is there, no night is there — nothing that maketh or worketh a lie. ”

“ Human hypotheses are always human vagaries, formulated views antagonistic to the divine order and the nature of Deity. All these mortal beliefs will be purged and dissolved in the crucible of Truth, and the places once knowing them will know them no more forever, having been swept clean by the winds of history. The grand verities of Science will sift the chaff from the wheat, until it is clear to human comprehension that man was, and is, God's perfect likeness, that reflects all whereby we can know God. ”

“ Who dare say that matter or mortals can evolve Science? Whence, then, is it, if not from the divine source, and what, but the contemporary of Christianity, so far in advance of human knowledge that mortals must work for the discovery of even a portion of it? Christian Science translates Mind, God, to mortals. It is the infinite calculus defining the line, plane, space, and fourth dimension of Spirit. It absolutely refutes the amalgamation, transmigration, absorption, or annihilation of individuality. It shows the impossibility of transmitting human ills, or evil, from one individual to another ”

“ Is man the supposer, false believer, sufferer?
Not man, but a mortal — the antipode of immortal man. Supposing, false believing, suffering are not faculties of Mind, but are qualities of error.
The supposition is, that God and His idea are not all-power; that there is something besides Him; that this something is intelligent matter; that sin — yea, selfhood — is apart from God, where pleasure and pain, good and evil, life and death, commingle, and are forever at strife; even that every ray of Truth, of infinity, omnipotence, omnipresence, goodness, could be absorbed in error! ”

“ Should not the loving warning, the far-seeing wisdom, the gentle entreaty, the stern rebuke have been heeded, in return for all that love which brooded tireless over their tender years? for all that love that hath fed them with Truth, — even the bread that cometh down from heaven, — as the mother-bird tendeth her young in the rock-ribbed nest of the raven's callow brood! ”

“ When this dear woman applied to Truth, she was a great sufferer. Her gratitude knows no bounds. Many chronic ailments, which have bound her with heavy chains for many years, are being removed one by one. It is such a sweet privilege to lead her out of this bondage of flesh, for she turns with such childlike trust and obedience to the book, and looks to that for aid in every trial and affliction. It is beautiful to see, and is a rebuke to some of us older in the thought, who depend so much on personality. ”

“ What is it but another name for Christian Science, the cognomen of all true religion, the quintessence of Christianity, that heals disease and sin and destroys death! Part and parcel of Truth and Love, wherever one ray of its effulgence looks in upon the heart, behold a better man, woman, or child. ”

“ Repentance is better than sacrifice. The costly balm of Araby, poured on our Master's feet, had not the value of a single tear.
Beloved children, the world has need of you, — and more as children than as men and women: it needs your innocence, unselfishness, faithful affection, uncontaminated lives. You need also to watch, and pray that you preserve these virtues unstained, and lose them not through contact with the world. What grander ambition is there than to maintain in yourselves what Jesus loved, and to know that your example, more than words, makes morals for mankind! ”

“ All the different phases of error in human nature the reformer must encounter and help to eradicate.
This period is not essentially one of conscience: few feel and live now as when this nation began, and our forefathers' prayers blended with the murmuring winds of their forest home. This is a period of doubt, inquiry, speculation, selfishness; of divided interests, marvellous good, and mysterious evil. But sin can only work out its own destruction; and reform does and must push on the growth of mankind. ”

“ The way is absolute divine Science: walk ye in it; but remember that Science is demonstrated by degrees, and our demonstration rises only as we rise in the scale of being.
Science and Philosophy
Men give counsel; but they give not the wisdom to profit by it. To ask wisdom of God, is the beginning of wisdom.
Meekness, moderating human desire, inspires wisdom and procures divine power. Human lives are yet uncarved, — in the rough marble, encumbered with crude, rude fragments, and awaiting the hammering, chiselling, and transfiguration from His hand. ”

“ If impatient of the loving rebuke, the student must stop at the foot of the grand ascent, and there remain until suffering compels the downfall of his self-conceit. Then that student must struggle up, with bleeding footprints, to the God-crowned summit of unselfish and pure aims and affections.
To be two-sided, when these sides are moral opposites, is neither politic nor scientific; and to abridge a single human right or privilege is an error. ”

“ Divine Science has rolled away the stone from the sepulchre of our Lord; and there has risen to the awakened thought the majestic atonement of divine Love. The at-one-ment with Christ has appeared — not through vicarious suffering, whereby the just obtain a pardon for the unjust, — but through the eternal law of justice; wherein sinners suffer for their own sins, repent, forsake sin, love God, and keep His commandments, thence to receive the reward of righteousness: salvation from sin, not through the death of a man, but through a divine Life, which is our Redeemer. ”

“ It is the genius of Christian Science to demonstrate good, not evil, — harmony, not discord; for Science is the mandate of Truth which destroys all error.
Whoever is honestly laboring to learn the principle of music and practise it, seldom calls on his teacher or musician to practise for him. The only personal help required in this Science is for each one to do his own work well, and never try to hinder others from doing theirs thus.
Christian Science, more than any other system of religion, morals, or medicine, is subject to abuses. ”

“ Heaven right here, where angels are as men, clothed more lightly, and men as angels who, burdened for an hour, spring into liberty, and the good they would do, that they do, and the evil they would not do, that they do not. From the falling leaves of old-time faiths men learn a parable of the period, that all error, physical, moral, or religious, will fall before Truth demonstrated, even as dry leaves fall to enrich the soil for fruitage.
Sin, sickness, and disease flee before the evangel of Truth as the mountain mists before the sun. ”

“ Strive for self-abnegation, justice, meekness, mercy, purity, love. Let your light reflect Light. Have no ambition, affection, nor aim apart from holiness. Forget not for a moment, that God is All-in-all — therefore, that in reality there is but one cause and effect.
The pride of circumstance or power is the prince of this world that has nothing in Christ. All power and happiness are spiritual, and proceed from goodness. Sacrifice self to bless one another, even as God has blessed you. Forget self in laboring for mankind ”