Page:Christian Science versus Pantheism.djvu/100

This page has been validated.
86
MESSAGES TO THE MOTHER CHURCH

believes that the Messiah or the Christ has not yet come; the Christian believes that Christ is come and is God. Here Christian Science intervenes, explains these doctrinal points, cancels the disagreement, and settles the whole question on the basis that Christ is the Messiah, the true spiritual idea, and this ideal of God is now and forever, here and everywhere. The Jew who believes in the First Commandment is a monotheist, he has one omnipresent God: thus the Jew unites with the Christian idea that God is come, and is ever present. The Christian who believes in the First Commandment is a monotheist: thus he virtually unites with the Jew's belief in one God, and that Jesus Christ is not God, as he himself declared, but is the Son of God. This declaration of Christ, understood, conflicts not at all with another of his sayings: “I and my Father are one,” — that is, one in quality, not in quantity. As a drop of water is one with the ocean, a ray of light one with the sun, even so God and man, Father and son, are one in being. The Scripture reads: “For in Him we live, and move, and have our being.”

Here allow me to interpolate some matters of business that ordinarily find no place in my Message. It is a privilege to acquaint communicants with the financial transactions of this church, so far as I know them, and especially before making another united effort to purchase more land and enlarge our church edifice so as to seat the large number who annually favor us with their presence on Communion Sunday.

When founding the institutions and early movements of the Cause of Christian Science, I furnished the money from