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Show THE CITIZEN that it will do. Well, count your dollars so long as you that way that is all jjjey isnt will do for you, there any But do you reQuestion about that. member the multitude which Jesus fed with the few loaves and fishes? Do you remember that five thousand bjd all they could eat, and that after was more left they bad finished there over than they had when they started? Ob, yes, you say, but that was Jesus, ge said that if we believed on him we should do the things that he did. Are 0u going to let God be true and behove it, and let every man be a liar, so the result of the human theory of limitation? want to tell a little experience my own on the question of finance that will probably be helpful. I had at one time a salary of one hundred dollars a month. I was always rather methodical about such things, so I. took my hundred dollars and I put it down here, and on the other side I put house rent and clothing, and food, and incidentals, and my little innocent amusements, and then church when I got down to church I didnt have anything left, the other things took the whole hundred dollars. May I say and I say it without criticism or inI of criticism that oftentimes penny or the nickel in the contribution plate represents the thought of the man who had put everything else down first and the church last. But I did that for a while and then it began, to worry me; in other words, a knocking at my thought said to me: The only reason you are upon the face of the earth is because of what Christian Science has done for you, and yet you are putting the church last; and after a while I saw it, and then I took a desperate plunge, and I turned it around and put the church first. And I put down for the church what seemed to me a perfectly enormous amount yes, and I put it in, too. I did not just put it down, I put it in. I did not change my method of living. I was not conscious of having made any change whatsoever; but at the end of the third month I found that I had paid all my bills, I had given to the church what I had pledged my own conscience to give it, and I had five dollars left over to put in the bank. Xow, then, what was the difference in the two methods? In the first I trusted my dollars and they were limited in their ability; in the second, I trusted my God and I found the limitation removed. In this present-dacrisis it is for the Christian Scientists to put trust in their God and go on with joy end happiness in the realization that the inexhaustible treasure of God is at their command, until they stop count-- g their dollars, and begin to count their blessings, and the result will be that Love will lift the shade of gloom and for all make radiant room, midst tentional the y the glories of one endless Eddy has taught us in the Hymn. day, as Mrs. Communion Christian Science is the open way tor us to come out from the shade of Soom to find the real, legitimate, uveiy peace which passes understand-ng- , wherein God is ad all the time. glorified first, last, Synonyms for God. Mrs. Eddy has unfolded to us a mar-eiou- s knowledge of God in the syno-Jui- s which she has given in Science nd Health with to the Scriptures for the wordKeyGod. .Many peo- e. .e thought that they did not be-e'- e li in God, but every one believes u God when he knows what He is; which Mrs. world would fiutually have been sufficient to have a'ed the entire world if she had never nttc n another thing. And I am going 8P(ak briefly on a few of these, in Jer that we may have the blessing mch comes to the Christian Scientist bo knows these synonyms. They are t unusual, except in perhaps one in JV Si) these synonyms udy hug given to the stance, but they are exceptional in the enlightenment which they give us as to what God is. Now Mrs. Eddy, in using these synonyms, does not limit or consent to the truth of the statement that there are two kinds of love, for instance; one that may turn into envy, murder, and hatred; and the other the love which Jesus Christ showed when he was enabled to say of those who were attempting to destroy him: Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. Mrs. Eddy teaches us that .God is Life. The Bible teaches us that God is Life. It says so in so many words Life, that is without beginning or with, out ending; Life, which manifests itself to be the eternal activity and creator; Life, that we are all longing and looking for. Any one knows that God and Life are one, and we are all working for Life we all believe in Life, and that is why we are working for it, and so because we believe in Life, we do believe in God. I have spoken to you of the teaching that God and Truth are one, and we do know that nothing on earth can be accomplished if it be hot for the realization of Truth which is changeless, and because we all do believe in Truth, con. sequently we all do believe in God. Then Mrs. Eddy teaches us that God is Love, the Love which Je3us showed in that hour of great testing and tribulation, and when we acquire that depth of Love we have reached a place and not until then when we can love our neighbors as ourselves, and when we find our own in establishing anothers good. Then Mrs. Eddy teaches us that God and Principle are one. A person when he hears that statement very often will say: Well, now, that is one of the objections that I have to some of the teachings of Christian Science. It takes my God away from me, and it gives me nothing but an ephemeral theory that I am to take and believe in. The Bible says that God is Life. Do you think that Life is a person? The Bible says that God is Truth. Do you think that Truth is a person? And the Bible teaches us that God is Love, and you know that Love is not a person. It is the impossibility of the finite grasping the infinite that makes the appeal to some of us in a strong way humanly that we want a God who is like ourselves. We want to think oi a man siting on a throne in a place as a judge; and we cannot have that kind of a God, my dear friends, if what the Bible teaches us about God is true, the Bible teaches us that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipres. and we know that no huent, man sense of person can possibly be omnipresent! or Mrs. Eddy teaches us that God and Principle are one, and, as I say, that seems to be an abstract statement, but it is not when we understand it. What is it that always brings to a successful issue, if properly used, every problem? Is it primary law, the rule of progression? Is that the problem, or the solution? No. It is the principle of mathematics which underlies all mathematical problems on which the ue-cau- se All-in-al- l, All-in-al- l. superstructure of all harmonious action is buihled, and the result is the correct answer. It is in this method and manner that Mrs. Eddy uses the statement that God and Principle are one. She means that God is the foundation, the literal foundation of all that is true, and that on this foundation we build the superstructure wherein God, man, and the universe are coincident and in all of them manifesting eternal Life, Truth, and Love, which constitute God. Mrs. Eddy also teaches us that God ami Mind are one. That has been a controverted point, perhaps more so than any other of Mrs. Eddys teachings I dont know why. There isnt 13 anything new in that statement or teaching. She has not propounded anything new for our acceptance in teaching that God and Mind are one. What does John say in opening his In the begingospel? He says this: Word was was and the the Word, ning with God, and the Word was God. On a simple analysis let us see where the statement leads us, so far as the foundation is concerned. What is the word? The word is the expression that accompanies or precedes thought. Thought is the activity of Mind. Therefore, because this is true, Mrs. Eddy's statement would be equally correct if it were used to say that in the beginning was Mind, and Mind was with God, and Mind was God and then we instantly see why it is implored of us that we should let that Mind be in us which was also in Christ Jesus, and we see what our Master meant when he said that it was not he that did these wonderful works but that it was as the Father working in him who accomplished them. And, in- cidentally, therefore, in further corroboration of the correctness of this teaching, let us revert to the first chap, ter of Genesis, wherein we read: God said . . . and it was so; and we know that the spoken word is the expression of the thought which goes with it, and thought is the activity of Mind. Therefore, it is not an abnormal, it is not an abstract statement to say that God is Mind, and when we come the Mind of Christ, to know that then we know that our God is omnipoGod is tent, omniscient, and omnipresent; that He is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and without variableness or shadow of turning. It has been said also of the Christian Scientists that they are not Bible students, that they devote all of their time to the study of Mrs. Eddys works. We may think we know some one in the Christian Science church, or attending the Christian Science church, who does that; but such a one is not a Christian Scientist. Mrs. Eddy gain, ed her whole revelation from the Bible, and Christian Scientists are Christian Scientists only as they know the Word of God and are able to analyze its spiritual import and meaning as we find it in our Bible; and when we do that with the aid and illumination of the Christian Science text book, then we are proving ourselves to be Christian Scientists, because we are striving to follow the Word of God to its ultimate demonstration and proof, and nothing less than that constitutes real, legitiChristian Godlike, mate, lovely, Science. Understanding Life. I have called attention to the Biblical teaching that God is Life, and because God is Life it is natural and nor. mal that all of us should be striving to know Life ami striving to demonstrate life. That is the reason that a calendar is such a liar. When it says life is born, it lies; it lies when it says that it is a year old; it lies when it says it is forty years old, it lies when it says that it is dead. It never did tell the truth, and it never will, because it tries to fix Life between the point called birth and another point called death. The time for us to refuse to have anything to do with the calendar is when we begin to think, not waiting until our hair is white or gone. Begin it and cling to it, and keep on clinging to the thought that it does not make any difference to us what the calendar says, that we know that God is Life, and that man, the image and likeness of God, knows that He is not a God of the dead, but a God of the living, and that mans birthright is Life. Now we Christian Scientists do not claim that we have yet reached the point where we completely overcome what Is universally termed sin, disease, or death, but we do call attention to the fact according to the returns of the 1910 census I have not been able to get the figures yet of 1920 that dur, ing the twenty-fivyears preceding that time there was an average increase of longevity of sixteen years, and that was the first twenty-fivyears during whinh Christian Science had become universally known and was being practiced the world over. If in the first twenty-fiv- e years of this knowledge of the allness and changelessness of God as Life in our feeble grasp of it, it could have produced such a condition as that, we know that as we come to a better, and a higher! and a holier, and a purer knowledge of Cxod, we shall continue to grow in longevity until we shall again have upon the earth the age of the and then if that sense antediluvians, of limitation will pass away, we shall know asd Jesus Christ whom He hath God sent, fhf likn0W ?im ls .eternal Life, as us. That age of the antediluvians has been an unhappy feature for nat-urthe scientists. They could not plain it away. They could not set they decided iwlh could recenty get around it, for just before going to Europe last spring, a little magazine published in New York was sent to me'in which edi- the tor expressed himself as delighted to at last the scientists t?1D not Scientists, but the natural scientists had found the explana-tiofor the age of the The magazine went on to antediluvians. had resolved, or rather hadsay that they determined after all these ages of that the only measure of timeresearch, the antediluvians had was the lunar measure of time, which would mean a month, and that therefore in these stories of the age of the antediluvians, wherever the word "year appears, there should be substituted the wnrd and month; then it went on to give an illustration. It said, for instance, these stories tell us that Adam lived to be nine hundred and thirty years of age, and the word month being substituted, and those months being resolved into years by the division of twelve, it would show that Adam lived to be about seventy-eight years of age, which was a rather close approximation to the theory of three-scorand ten being the natural life of man upon earth. Now, that sounds quite logical, and coming from the natural scientists it is bound to have a good deal of force. But there are one or two little things that interfere with the acceptance of that theory and I want to (fall your at-- , tention to two of them. In the same story in he Bibtle where they teach us that. Adam lived to be nine hundred and thirty years of age, it also tells us that when Seth was born Adam was one hundred and thirty years of age. Call that months, resolve it into years, and it shows that Seth was born when Adam was ten and years of age; and he already had two children. It is even worse with Methuselah, because the Bible says that when Me-thuselah was born his father Enoch was sixty-fivyears of age, and read-- 1 ing that in the same way it shows that when Methuselah was born, Enoch, his f father, was five and years old. It is amazing that every attempt on the part of human theory to explain away the almightiness of the Word of God and its truth always slays itself, because it is not and cannot be logical; but when it is presented to us as it should be, the logic is clear to us and brings to us the thought of the old patriarch, who cried to us, Turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for. e e ai nivth-aJ- - n e : ' , one-ha- lf ; 1 s e one-hal- why will ye die. . . ? I have been much interested in an (Continued on page 15.) . , . |