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Chapter 3 - The Christ and Christian Science.
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When the clergyman called back the same day after his evening service, as he had promised he would, she opened the door for him. It would be an understatement to say that the man was merely startled at seeing her up and about. It should be noted here, that in 1866 the mental climate was limited to acknowledging nothing but material causes for material results. After all, this was the age of scientific materialism. Metaphysical healing seemed very much out of place in this atmosphere, even to a clergyman who routinely deals with spiritual issues.
Dr. Quimby's methods, or the methods of homoeopathy, might have been more easily acceptable to the clergyman, since they did have a totally material basis. After all, these methods were based on theories in which the material mind was thought to be interacting with matter. Their disbelief was certainly justified, knowing as they did, that even these semimetaphysical methods had never produced the kind of startling results that Mary Baker Eddy had experienced. Divine metaphysics is resting on a different basis than anything connected with human mind force. Its basis is in a realm totally beyond material physics, as the term meta-physics literally indicates. Psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy that are offered today, are still fundamentally material, though they were still far off in the future at the time. It might be suggested that Quimby may have unwittingly paved the way for them. It is doubtful, also, that any of today's modern agents of mind power have cases on record in which severe spinal injuries correct themselves spontaneously in the space of mere moments.
Theology, understandingly, was shocked at what had taken place. Theologians were shocked by the 'miracle' with which Mary Baker Eddy now confronted them. Medicine, too, was shocked. The theologians had regarded the occurrence of miracles as belonging to a distant past and to privileged executors of divine power. It must have appeared to the theological fundamentalist as some kind of spiritual treason for any person to claim to have access to the divine power that heals, much less a woman, not withstanding that the Scriptures define humanity as spiritual beings made in the likeness of God.
Years later, Mary Baker Eddy wrote about her healing: "That short experience included a glimpse of the great fact that I have since tried to make plain to others, namely, Life in and of Spirit; this life being the sole reality of existence."*(Miscellaneous Writings 24:14)
She also writes about this experience in connection with the First Commandment (Thou shalt have no other gods before me.) Here she states: "It is plain that the Me spoken of in the First Commandment, must be Mind; for matter is not the Christian's God, and is not intelligent.... All must be Mind and Mind's idea; since, according to natural science, God, Spirit, could not change its species and evolve matter."*(Miscellaneous Writings 23:14) (Note: The word, Mind, is in its capitalized form to indicate that the word refers to divine Mind. In contrast, the lower case form of the word refers to the human mind.)
Mary Baker Eddy's perception of reality goes beyond any mind over matter theory that modern psychiatry is based on, which also Quimby operated from. Mary Baker Eddy saw a totally different reality, a reality that is wholly spiritual, in which the concept of a self-existent material mind, even matter itself, is unknown. She saw a reality held in divine Mind, a universe that exists as an idea, a structure of infinite Spirit that is manifested in spiritual man and a spiritual universe. On this basis, what appears as a material universe, is being recognized in Science as a subjective image only, of the human mind. In divine Science "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all."*(Science and Health 468:10)
Does this spiritual view, therefore, deny the evidence of natural history discovered through the science of paleontology? According to the best available evidence in planetary studies, the universe, as we know it, began approximately 15 billion million years ago. Then billion years from this time, the planet earth began to form. During the planet's first 1,000 million years of primordial existence, identified as the Precambrian era, the unfolding of life is believed to have begun on this planet.
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