Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/513

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PRAYER AND ATONEMENT.
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constant. This certainly applies to Truth and Love, understood and practised. Firmness in error will never save from sickness, sin, and death.

Acquaintance with the original texts, and willingness to give up human beliefs (established by hierarchies, and instigated sometimes by the worst passions of men), open the way for Christian Science to be understood, and make the Bible the chart of Life, to mark the healing currents and buoys of Truth.

Publius Lentulus wrote to the authorities at Rome, “The disciples of Jesus believe him the Son of God.” Those taught by Jesus in Science have reached the glorious perception that God is the author of mankind. The virgin-mother conceived this idea of God, and gave to her ideal the name of Jesus — i. e. Joshua, or Saviour.

The illumination of Mary's spiritual sense put to silence material law, and its order of generation, and brought forth her child by the revelation of Truth, demonstrating God as the Father of man. The Holy Ghost, or Divine Science, overshadowed the pure sense of the virgin-mother with the full recognition that being is Spirit. The Christ dwelt forever as an ideal in the bosom of the Principle of the man Jesus, and woman perceived this idea, though at first faintly developed in the infant form.

Man and woman, as the ideas of Spirit, are the immortal evidences that Spirit is harmonious and man eternal. Jesus was the offspring of Mary's self-conscious communion with God. Hence he could give a more spiritual idea of Life than other men, and could demonstrate the Science of the Divine Principle.

As the individual ideal of Truth, Jesus came to rebuke rabbinical error, and all sin, sickness, and death, — to