Johnston Letters from 1947
New York City,
4 Sept., ’47 – Thurs.
Dear . . . . . .
If we were not looking to God as Christian Science, instead of to Boston, we might well think the world is leading Christian Science, instead of God as Christian Science guiding the world. Probably you two have read both the Chief of Staff’s and the President’s speeches, of the past week. They both illustrate, and are illumined by, the metaphysician of Christian Science. They are proof of how God’s true and final word as Christian Science, is leavening amongst nations at its highest point of conception, the mortal concept.
In His mysterious way, His wonders to perform, we have our two leading officials proclaiming truth in accord with Christian Science, and the “official” Christian Scientists proclaiming its ecclesiastical negation. Just as in the Trial, Hughes gave a fine metaphysical statement as to Christian Science and its unity, as defined by our Leader, while the Directors and the Field moved unswervingly for its opposite. I think we will have to say, Thank God for “the clear, correct teaching of Christian Science.”
I am sending quotes to you from these two speeches for two reasons. I want a record of these salient points of the truth of America, and illustrating the truth of Christian Science. Then, I thought these statements directly or indirectly are of special interest, as you may face any un-American claim of denial of your individual freedom to think and act in accord with your sole conscience, your direct turning to God with no interference.
In this connection, you recall just after I got this typewriter the first of the year, I sent you several pages on quotes etc. from Mrs. Eddy on Christian Science and our government. Unfortunately, I did not have carbons then. So you were to return that in time. ……, why don’t you look it over, especially all the references. If you want a copy, send it on, and my friend will copy it for you.
The President of the United States may well be thought to have as full and pressing duties, at least as the Directors, not to mention the Trustees. The President is a politician. He is also a Baptist, by the way as was Hughes,… Instead of saying to all South America, we can all get on together, if you all will accept our supremacy and supreme governing authority, he all the way says just the reverse. It all, as with Eisenhower, is free, voluntary cooperation. The President’s concluding statement is, not WILL YOU ACCEPT OUR WILL, but: “We cannot be dissuaded, and we cannot be diverted, from our efforts to achieve His will.”
Here is our Chief of Staff, General Eisenhower, saying: “A united and determined American citizenry is, under God-“Voluntary association under God is the only bond Love knows. (A LETTER, J.)-under God-again just to repeat-the mightiest force the earth has seen. It can protect itself and lead the world to respect for right and justice-and to peace.” Thus Eisenhower closes his talk to the Legion, as above I quote our President’s closing sentence to our Southern nation neighbors. HIS WILL AND ALL UNDER GOD, not under a party, or our government, or Directors, or any human sense as controlling! Wouldn’t our Leader love
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to read that. To see the leavening of her vast founding of Christian Science! And I don’t think Boston as C.S. would bother her at all. For she must have foreseen it, in the way she left the estoppels to ecclesiasticism. In one sense of course, Mrs. Eddy must have been profoundly unhappy. She has shown that all the way through her founding as she repeatedly chided, KEEP THE WATCH, now is the time to do your own work!. That is the only way I can see Mrs. Eddy’s last several weeks in 1910; had she completed, could she do more, was her founding absolutely complete, for this so stupid human she had been commanded and commissioned by God, to give His final word to? Edward A. Kimball alone had met her standard for the other, the who for the founding and the which, for he had proved SCIENCE AND HEALTH could achieve its purpose for God as Christian Science. That purpose is to turn this so-called mortal to absolute understanding, to “the clear, correct teaching of Christian Science.”
On this great fundamental in Christian Science, Eisenhower has a great passage: “No Government official, no soldier, be he brass hat or Pfc., no other person can assume your responsibilities-else democracy will cease to exist. (So will Christian Science so far as anyone accepts the Directors or anyone else as their Mind-conscience and own knowing. J). They are yours, to meet or neglect! In the one direction lies first our immediate and future safety. Beyond that are all our aspirations, our hopes for ourselves and our children. In the other direction lies the destruction of all we hold dear.”
How often Mrs. Eddy put the full Science of that! In SCIENCE AND HEALTH of course, in 1908 she closed the Chapter on Christian Science Practice with it, 442:30-32. In July 1889, as she was withdrawing from Boston and founding spiritual organization in Christian Science, she wrote Julia Bartlett: “Again my students must learn sooner or later to guard themselves, to watch and not be misled.” (Powell, 310). In the March Journal 1897, as Mrs. Eddy forbade all personal teaching and required all to get their teaching from her books, she wrote: “The hour has struck for Christian Scientists to do their own work; to appreciate the signs of the times; to demonstrate self-knowledge and self-government; and to demonstrate as this period demands, over all sin, disease, and death.” (Mis. 317)
How appropriate that statement right now. And of course as Mrs. Eddy left her estoppels, this direct teaching from her books, began its steady but gradual reinstatement, as the already authorized teachers successively finished their course. Dickey in his book quotes Mrs. Eddy, somewhere at the close of her final founding days: “I had to do it (keep the watch), and did it for forty years and you must do it. You must rise to the point where you can destroy the belief in mesmerism or you will have no Cause. Now it has gotten to the point where students must take up this work and meet animal magnetism. I cannot do it for you. You must do it for yourselves, and unless it is done the Cause will perish and we will go along another 1900 years with the world sunk in blackest night. Now will you arouse yourselves? You have all the power of God with you to conquer this lie of mesmerism. The workers in the field are not healing because they are not meeting animal magnetism which says they cannot heal.” Then she turned to each one and said, ‘will you keep your watch?'”
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Of course that also was Jesus’ constant cry, even without the Science of it, and on the masthead of the Sentinel cover as you know Mrs. Eddy put: “What I say unto you I say unto all-WATCH. Jesus”. Only the substance of this great truth in Christian Science can lead such a one as our Chief of Staff, to make the same basic plea, in his language, for our own beloved country. While in Boston, this plea is denied in fury with its, We, the Directors are the watch-dogs for all in Christian Science.
Eisenhower speaks of “a stifling web of circumstances, CRUSHING INDEPENDENT THOUGHT AND ACTION—NATIONAL OR INDIVIDUAL (my caps. J). Our Government acutely aware of the significance of these contradictory currents, has announced its support of the first trend and its opposition to the second (quoted above J). Although Christian Science is the very and absolute Science of “independent thought and action-national or individual,” even as Boston tries to deny it from you, our military chief is basing our whole government and substance as a nation on this which is so the essence of Christian Science.
Right now as Mrs. Eddy’s founding is seen to be voluntary association in the bond of spirit only, the Christian compact in the bond only of the Principle of divine Love, Eisenhower says: “I firmly believe that the only prescription for absolute security for any nation, including our own, is international understanding and cooperation…But we must face the hard fact that during the two years since hostilities ended, the cooperative spirit has lost ground.” Dozens of speeches and articles these past months have brought out the point that our working out rightly is in genuine cooperation. Here we have it. The individual freedom under God, looking to Him alone for guidance. The cooperative freedom that alone can win, genuine and honest cooperation on this same divine basis and Principle. Really, the Publishing Society to-day has opportunities beyond-almost beyond, the imagination and contemplation. Every morning in the papers I am tempted to make many clippings.
Eisenhower went right on to say, after the above, what I make separate here just for emphasis: “The world comprises two great camps, grouped on the one side around dictatorships which subject the individual to absolute control and on the other, democracy which proves him a free and unlimited horizon.” How absolutely true and who and what? We know of course the leaven working in human consciousness in its ever better statement of the ideal. As Mrs. Eddy wrote at the turn of the century: “Is it too much to say that this book is leavening the whole lump of human thought? You can trace its teachings in each step of mental and spiritual progress, from pulpit and press, in religion and ethics, and find these progressive steps either written or indicated in the book. It had mounted thought on the swift and mighty chariot of divine Love, which to-day is circling the whole world.” (My. 114-15).
At the same time, 1900, Mrs. Eddy also showed how she kept her eye on all public utterance and the day’s news: “Carlyle wrote:
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‘woulds’t thou plant for eternity, then plant into the deep infinite faculties of man…If the poor…toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that we have light,…freedom, immortality?’ I agree with him; and in our era of the world I welcome the means and methods, light and truth, emanating from the pulpit and press.” (My. 154).
Every issue of the press, it seems to me, almost always carries items from both pulpit and news illuminating to, and illuminated by, the metaphysics of Christian Science. How marvelous it is, in strict accord with this metaphysics, that even as God has had to move ecclesiastically as it has appeared with the Christian Science movement, His SCIENCE AND HEALTH has gone steadily forward leavening human thought with its “clear, correct teaching of Christian Science,” thus sheltering and clarifying the nation’s vision that enabled SCIENCE AND HEALTH, and the full founding of Christian Science to come forth, and so not an hour lost in upholding this nation on the earth, and constantly bringing nearer the reign of Christ, as the ideal of thought and action.
Eisenhower again: “Through unity of action we can be a veritable colossus in support of peace. No one can defeat us unless we first defeat ourselves. Every one of us must be guided by this truth…The thought I leave with you is this. The American system rests upon the rights and the dignity of the individual. The success of the system depends upon the assumption by each of personal, individual responsibility for the safety and welfare of the whole.” In his language what an affirmation that each one must KEEP THE WATCH, that no one else, including the Directors, can do this really for another. Our whole American experience and fabric of structure has been built on this basis, that man is dependent on and governed by God, that our government was born and lives to assure this freedom of practice to the individual as his right and dignity, and fundamentally we measure our responsibility in the degree of achievement of the Christ-ideal.
In President Truman’s speech yest’y to the Brazilian Congress, in this A.M., Sat’y., after referring to a Brazilian statesman of earlier days, who had preached and in degree practiced the Golden Rule amongst nations, went on to say: “The idea was not new. It was part of Brazil’s inheritance, as it is part of the inheritance of every other Christian nation…His declaration that there can be no neutrality between right and wrong will remain forever part of the moral traditions of your country…The one essential is that we maintain our common ideals and our common principles of morality and justice.”
Those ideals and those principles of morality and justice stem, of course, straight from Christ, and historic Christianity, and are forever grounded in the divine Principle of infinite Love as the Christ-ideal. Though the Jew has our one God, Judaism is neither America or our ideal. As the Brazilian Senator introducing the President yesterday said: “The future of Christian civilization is in the hands of the United States.”
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In this talk yesterday, the theme of the President’s Christ-ideal in government is free men in self-government. He speaks of how “the tree of responsible self-government is to blossom fully and bear rich fruit…of the ideals of free government, not those of absolute monarchy”, of how the resources of both nations “have been developed by people whose dominant motive was freedom.” The President in part states this nation’s Christ-ideal: “We have the same belief in the fundamental rights of man. We have the same respect for the dignity of the individual. We look upon international relations as governed by the same standards of moral conduct by which individuals are governed.
The President asserted: “The United States will be faithful to (its) great trust…We have proved to ourselves that policies founded firmly on belief in the dignity of man and his possession of certain inalienable rights inspire us to greater endeavor and lead us to new heights of achievement.”
In his earlier speech at Rio, the President was again affirming the Christian ideals of our nation: “We are determined, because of the belief of our people in the principle that there are basic human rights which all men everywhere should enjoy…We know that there are aspirations for a better and a finer life which are common to all humanity. We know-and the world-knows that these aspirations have never been promoted by policies of aggression…There are concrete problems ahead of us…But their solution will be easier if we are able to set our sights above the troubles of the moment and to bear in mind the great truths upon which our common destiny must rest…The United States seeks…a peace of free men.”
How akin this last is to SCIENCE AND HEALTH: “The discoverer of Christian Science finds the path less difficult when she has the high goal always before her thoughts, than when she counts her footsteps in endeavoring to reach it. When the destination is desirable, expectation speeds our progress.” (426). And: “Do you not hear from all mankind of the imperfect model? The world is holding it before your gaze continually…To remedy this, we must first turn our gaze in the right direction, and then walk that way. We must form perfect models in thought and look at them continually, or we shall never carve them out in grand and noble lives. Let unselfishness, goodness, mercy, justice, health, holiness, love-the kingdom of heaven-reign within”. Not only that we must keep our gaze fixed to the ideal, but more specifically, our Christ-ideal.
Marshall and Vandenberg spoke here when they returned this week. You may have heard them. Both exemplify more of the same. Just occasionally at a momentous period, do our public leaders really have to reach down to their deepest conviction. Of course this whole era, as A LETTER pointed out, is that compared with any before. You recall last January, when the government changed administration for the first time in 16 years, we got those searching statements of our government, that led me to summarize some of them in that letter to you, the one I wish you would return, at least for a copy. Such
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material in a great court fight may be and ought to be valuable. It certainly is fundamental to understanding of Christian Science, to understand the oneness of the two, and how both grew together in mutual support from the common basis.
Only in these United States could the Science of this Christian and Christ-ideal have blossomed and borne rich fruit.” Only with this constant leavening of “the whole lump of human thought” will and can our beloved American achieve its full and divine destiny on earth. And that absolutely requires as Mrs. Eddy foresaw, the bringing especially as she points out, of American Christendom to Christian Science practice.
Marshall: “Agreement was reached on a voluntary basis…no nation triumphed over any other, for this was not a contest…yet there resulted in watered-down formula-no lowest common denominator of compromise of vital principles.” Repeatedly and increasingly we see in the news, the emphasis on VOLUNTARY COOPERATION, voluntary association, to achieve the peace and progress of the world. Ah, how Mrs. Eddy founded and defined the Science of this voluntary association under God, now the practical ideal directly sought by the Christian world under American leadership. All this association “under God”, as both the President and the Chief of Staff have within this week specifically pointed out.
Marshall, on the true spirit of any conference: “We met largely as acquaintances with a common desire. We parted as friends in a common bond of trust and understanding. Our deliberations were open to the world. It will not be easy to misrepresent.” Earlier Marshall had spoken of “trust and cooperation”. Yesterday in Brazil the President spoke, as pointed out, “The United States will be faithful to a great trust on which depend the lives and liberty of so many millions of disillusioned and discouraged peoples.”
Historians always have agreed that religion is the heart and fount of any nation. Except by those of Godless materialism, such as Russia. Now where do we find religion itself first being made a public trust, a public charitable trust? You know of course full well. Mrs. Eddy began it in 1889, as she took over her church property, herself to hold, having saved the loss of it to her church on foreclosure, until she could complete at law, this church public charitable trust in God’s final definition of religion to mankind. And finally in 1898, with the Publishing Society. If the government of each nation on earth now is beginning to see its position is really one of world Trust, as a particular trustee, can it be doubted Mrs. Eddy’s founding of this fact has been the leavening of “the whole lump of human thought”? The deeper and greater must precede the less and resultant. In any sense of cause and effect.
A failure to understand God’s negation, or negatively moving, might lead the superficial to imagine God had led in all these now visible expressions, but having started all that, let his chosen ones in Christian Science get of the track, and now so ironically, those “without the Science” are fulfilling what those of the Science are denying. That of course reckons without “the clear, correct
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teaching of Christian Science”, and how He who is All has steadily carried it right on, and immensely forward. It reckons without the immortal, constant, and instant impact of SCIENCE AND HEALTH as that word as clear, correct Science, never dependent on a mortal, and ever fulfilling His divine command and plan for what His faithful and “angel-scribe” gave as His greatest gift to mankind.
What Marshall said about conferences is just as true for any conference you might have. Now for our great Senator Vandenberg, the man who has shown these past years about as much an instant and turn around awakening as Paul himself; he speaks of “on high moral grounds”, and “moral guidance”, of “the three deadly foes of mankind”: “Nothing that we have done is aimed at any other enemies than war and aggression and injustice, the three deadly foes of mankind.” You do not need to be reminded where the shoe of ecclesiasticism pinches here.
Vandenberg goes on: “We are building upon a mutual trust. This is a true partnership…But that is not all…The framers of this treaty lifted their sights to the horizons of the earth (world and universal J). They meant what they said in that fundamental obligation…This is all-inclusive.” Here again, public trust to the whole world is accepted as the standard in government for our and all the American nations. It is not only universal in its responsibility, but no “double-talk”, each word meaning just what it says, all-inclusive in its reading and interpretation not to be denied. And that Christian Scientists would take Mrs. Eddy’s words in the Manual with less straightforward responsibility in her honesty of statement, than Vandenberg takes this fine agreement amongst the American governments!
Vandenberg: “All these agreements were hammered out on the anvils of full, free and general debate. There was no semblance of dictation from any source.” Here again as with Marshall, is the ideal in Christian Science of any conference. “There was no cut and dried advance plan which reduced action to the shallow status of empty formality…The pledge is solely a peace pledge. At all times it recognizes that peace is founded on justice and moral order and, consequently, the international recognition and protection of human rights and freedoms, on the indispensable well-being of the people, and on the effectiveness of democracy for the international realization of justice and security…What we have put on paper in this treaty is important. But far more important is the spiritual unity which thus makes common cause in answer to the dearest prayers of humankind.”
How Mrs. Eddy would bless that statement! The SPIRITUAL UNITY, and all these various statements of our top leaders in our government give a fair idea of this spiritual unity, which in its full scientific statement, our Leader in her works so gloriously has brought to full light and understanding! One of the most historic results of our Leader’s Trust founding, that ’98 Trust “to defeat a demon scheme”, is found in the Trustees’ Letter to the Directors
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of Sept. 30, 1918. It is in the closing sentence which Vandenberg’s so readily evokes. I hate to get stumped on reference quotes but here, before I give this quote at the moment I seem to be. Somewhere HWE or the then Trustees speak of this letter of what they are confident will in time be found to be one more chapter or statement of the Magna Carta of Christian Science. Here it is used only as with the other Science statements in this letter, as forerunners of the leavening:
The Trustees letter of Sept. 30, ’18 to the Directors, its closing statement: “Yet when all is said and done, in spite of the tremendous importance of the letter, still how small is the letter compared to that Spirit that must inspire everything bequeathed to us by our Leader in the service of God. It is in the unity of this Spirit that this letter is written, signed, and sent.”
Paul said: “It is the Spirit that quickeneth”. Mrs. Eddy in SCIENCE AND HEALTH was directed to say: “Spirit is positive…For Spirit to pass through a negative condition would be Spirit’s destruction…Man is spiritual, individual, and eternal; material structure is mortal…Human reason and religion come slowly to the recognition of spiritual facts, and so continue to call upon matter to remove the error which the human mind alone has created. The idols of civilization are far more fatal to health and longevity than are the idols of barbarism…Nothing save divine power is capable of doing so much for man as he can do for himself (self-responsibility, self-government J). The footsteps of thought, rising above material standpoints, are slow, and portend a long night to the traveler; but the angels of His presence-the spiritual intuitions that tell us when ‘the night is far spent, the day is at hand’-are our guardians in the gloom. Whoever opens the way in Christian Science is a Pilgrim and stranger, marking out the path for generations yet unborn…Truth is revealed. It needs only to be practiced.” (S&H.173-74).
……., you can see this letter started several days ago, each day as our Leaders in government came in with more, so the letter was prolonged. As you have based your Boston stand on both Christian Science, and the laws of our land, I thought this was of value to you and….; also I wanted it for my own record, in my file of the universality of the churches in their practice of Christian Science. Practically all Mrs. Eddy in special statements she made on Christian Science, from 1899 on, were given to the public through the public press, not in the Journal or Sentinel. Her final founding in periodical of course was the Monitor, when all was about completed, for the Mother Church government dissolving, her leadership only as her Word as Christian Science as God. Orgain has argued, and could be, the Monitor was the only periodical to go on. It strikes me Christian Scientists don’t get time to READ and study Mrs. Eddy, so busy reading these weekly directed references, above all, all these Sentinels and Journals. It all is demonstration and it will get nowhere in Boston, until the two Trusts OBEY.
I see in your last you mention re your mother. As you know,
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old age is belief in venereal poison, having a beginning. As the old saying is, what goes up must come down. Finity as truth is finity. Even as mental tries to simulate it is spiritual (A LETTER). I have just had occasion to reread and study, “Science Understood, Translates Matter Into Mind.” If you think that wise, reread that to Mrs. ?,–I never knew your manny’s name, and for me, Gosh, we Christian Scientists of “cct”, cannot fool ourselves, that we are dealing with a thing or a fact, as being or evil: “The only incentive of a mistaken sense is malicious animal magnetism,–the name of all evil,–and this must be understood.”
You know, in the middle East, that old ancient to His western new, over the past thirty years, we constantly hear of those living up to 150 and beyond. Of course the Old Testament goes far beyond that, up to is it 999? Besides, we can’t die anyway! All we in negation can do is just got go through the old notions of finite sense, even at the worst the sure bond at some point we will just take on the glorious reality that sparks us all, as His. Your mother is, before Abraham, I AM. Even in a so-called relative and transitional sense; will you kindly tell your mother for me, I would like her to carefully read your Boston correspondence, and add her post-script in judgment. From here, it is hewing and on the “dotted line”. That is something every belief of mother should cherish and rise to, as worthy unfolding.
That little dig in my last,…., was not at all re you, but… How about his report re all the field reactions to PR? In fact and truth, one of the best Mind-signs to me in PR, has been that it never got off on a popularity run. Sure, PR easily if it has the slightest sense of publicity, could have made great field response, just as the Doorly crowd has done. But that all happened in 1919-20. And had you done so, I think the response you have found fruitful, never would have come. Our best to the Houston faithfuls. Mary gets back to-night.
(Signed) Joseph E. Johnston
* * * * * * * * * *
New York City
9 Sept., ’47 – Tues.
Dear —–
Thank you, . . . . . ., for yours of last Friday, with the interesting enclosure from Boston. They must have decided it was better to try to head you off before they got too involved with you. They could also feel this gives them a running start. The quick change they made from the letter in which they decided to accept your offer to come to Boston, then turned around trying to foreclose the whole matter before you came, showed some long-bearded advisor felt they had gotten on dangerous ground and doubtless seized that opening to try to get out. Naturally, had you answered as they then demanded that you had nothing to do with PR etc., there would from their point of view been no further need or excuse for a conference.
God guiding, and His guidance, and not the details and this and that is, of course the important thing. For His guidance positively and negatively establishes the spiritual fact, the true history that eternally moves forward as His line of light. Permit me to say again, I just don’t see how your letters could be improved. You stayed right with divine Principle, and obedience to the Manual at every point. You expressed His power which indeed is your All-in-all, in place of malicious fear. What has a Christian Scientist really got of Christian Science anyway, except in his fidelity to it, and does he not measure that in his successive milestones of rising light, of another new and larger view of His allness and power as Christian Science?
How interesting also yesterday, was that Moscow statement of Stalin, coming at this time, and right after the barrage of statements the week before it, of our top government officials. The Soviets of course were trying to make this ism look ancient, with deep enduring roots. Evil has to ape the ever rising, thorough-out our so-called mortal history, line of light. They were trying to celebrate the 800th year of this more or less mud-dump known as Moscow.
What I quote from Stalin, speaks for itself, both as to our own government’s fundamentals and also in paraphrase of ecclesiastical directors’ stand and arguments. Stalin as you see, claims that the only independence for small units is to be under “a unified state under a united leadership.” Otherwise some one else is sure to gobble you up, Q.E.D., we do you the favor by gobbling you first, so you can be free and independent. Curiously enough this A.M., Prescott in the Times reviews Gooch’s book on Frederich The Great, just out to-day. On this idea of Stalin’s and of the ruling Boston belief now, Frederick at the outset of his aggression as a
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young man of 29 said: “I have been compelled to send my troops into the Dutchy in order to prevent others seizing it. Of course it was wholly unprovoked seizure, with even no declaration of intention, such as the Soviets work, and the ecclesiastics too, for they never say or ever had, what is on their minds. As with Rowlands, and so as with you, they say something they do not in their heart believe, just to avoid facing and possibly having to say, what they dare not face as their uncovering, and so destruction. As Mrs. Eddy says, error uncovered is two-thirds destroyed, and the other third murders itself.
Stalin also says we substituted a “labor monopoly for a capitalist monopoly.” Ecclesiasticism as directors from the outset were bitten with the “bug” that someone humanly would control Christian Science on earth, so surely for the good of God and mankind they had better slip into Mrs. Eddy’s place without her, and go right ahead, as the monopolistic control. Just an extract of a few of Stalin’s running statements: “Moscow first and foremost became the basis of the uniting of a dismembered Russia into a unified state with a unified leadership…Only a country united into a centralized state can count on the possibility of a serious cultural-economic growth, ON THE POSSIBILITY OF ASSERTING ITS INDEPENDENCE. (my caps.) The historic service of Moscow consists in that it was and remains the basis and the creator of a centralized state…it became the bearer of the banner of a new epoch…which replaced the domination of capital by the domination of labor…Moscow represents at present the inspirer of the construction of a new democracy…not only the initiator of the construction of a new life, but simultaneously represents a model for all…Moscow represents the mouthpiece of the struggle.”
The last is excellent and best, for certainly everyone out of Moscow, Gromyko, their German, Austrian, Korean, and other spokesmen, “represents the mouthpiece of the struggle,” no one out of the Kremlin ever can know. The rest of the world, whether Washington, London or where, ever can speak with the “mouth-piece” being voiced. Is it not just the same in its degree in Boston? In the Trial, that mouthpiece soon was to the discerning-but not to the duped masses-found to be Cliff Smith. Who is now? What mental manipulator there suddenly reversed the Directors’ position, as to your courageous and fair and fine offer, to come there and hear all your accusers?
Fortunately, the metaphysician in Christian Science is one step ahead of this ancient, personal skullduggery. He knows All is Mind, and the reversor is God, reversing all unlike Himself and His way, so negatively stated to bring out this fullness of what is and is all there is, now. That evil can never seemingly start, that is borrow, until first He has moved, in His Principle of divine Love, is a mighty reassurance to the Christian Scientist. Evil always, in war especially and in peace too, always seems a step ahead. But the “clear, correct teaching of Christian Science” shows differently. He is all, He is the one step, so always ahead, and He uses evil as
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its reality as His name, to assure each and ever knee shall bow, all shall know Me from the least to the greatest, that the pure desire and appearing shall be found as His, All-in-all and All-to-all, to each one. Thus Mrs. Eddy ever said, When the negation ceases to BLESS us, God no longer will so move to us.
Just now I got off the phone with a man, whom a NYC practitioner gave a copy of A LETTER to. He at once ordered some more from S.J., was so excited, and wants to see me this P.M. He mentioned PR. Said he had not seen it lately. I said, you better order the next #30 at once, several of them, and tell your friend. He said he would. He expects to see me here this afternoon late. I mention this only as the straw in the wind, of the growing eager Mind-desire. God is your guide, and since He is the very infinity of irresistible, undeniable good, and you look only there, how great is His blessing awaiting you.
Interestingly enough-to me the whole of being these days in the press is so most exciting-in the Tribune yest’y. A.M., on the editorial page, appeared an unusual letter on RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. It was signed by some well known names, Henry Noble MacCracken, Geo. Schuster and Willard Johnson, on behalf of the Human Rights Committee, Nat’ Conf. of Christians and Jews: there was also a Rosenberg signer, and Shuster likely is a Jew. But only to its substance:
“Religious freedom, thus understood, should include at least the following: 1) Freedom from compulsion to do what one’s conscience forbids; 2) Freedom to worship according to conscience…, 3) Freedom to preach, teach, educate and persuade.” Now the highest first standard in its Science of all this is proclaimed in Science and Health. You do not need from me its infinite, glorious passages on this. That is what our Concordance is for, if not in our thought at once at hand. But to my quotes in the last letter, may I add this for you two: SCIENCE AND HEALTH: 223:14, to 226:21! The exclamation mark is just to emphasize you read it all here, before you go further.
Not that I here really have anything more to say. ….., of course, you should use up all of your “Joiner” stationery. Economy is enjoined in the Manual. Even so, your script is attractive in good taste. Now you know I know how busy you two are. That no PR report was, ….., a slight dig to you. You know I also know as said, you are busy. But now about fifteen minutes a quarter or oftener, would give yours truly a bit of an idea, the response of the field to PR. No misunderstanding on this. HWE. In 1919 would not read the mass of mesmerism that came into them from the field. IF he had, who would have directed him to do that? God or malicious mind? But I know you are reading your mail. It is a little different.
…..: Does not our SCIENCE AND HEALTH open with: “To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings. . . Contentment with the past and the cold conventiality of materialism are crumbling away. (Ignorance of God etc.) The only guarantee of obedience is a right apprehension of Him whom to know aright is Life eternal.” Did not Mrs. Eddy close her word as Christian Science: “God is my Life”? E. and W., not Boston, but God is my Life!
Our best to you in this your new hour!
(signed) Joseph E. Johnston
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New York City
10 Sept., ’47 – Wed.
Dear—-
Here I believe is the last edition now on what our Leaders in American government are proclaiming as our foundation and true substance. Only this one goes back to the world’s premier statesman, A. Lincoln. Last eve I was going through some of his statements in Carl Sandburg’s four volumes of THE WAR YEARS, A LINCOLN. A great deal so divinely metaphysical and helpful now could be quoted. But I shall use just a few, that seem to me of especial interest to you two and us now…
Now for America as Abe Lincoln found his guidance, both to hold the Union together, and to leave a Christly-spiritual recording in acts confirmed by many words of truth, that without question was his house that he built on that Rock which storms cannot wash away, neither made by hands nor built on sands. Lincoln had and shows the conviction never shared with belief. In June 1864 as Grant was showing the South and Lee what determined war, relentless, ever vicious and relistless in attack meant, Lincoln could state:
“War at the best is terrible, and this of ours in its magnitude and duration is one of the most terrible the world has ever known. (Our Civil War exceeded in death, wounded, and extent of men and territory anything to then this earth had ever known-J). I do not wish to name the day when it will end, lest the end should not come at the given time. We accepted this war, and did not begin it. We accepted it for an object, and when that object
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is accomplished the war will end, and I hope to God it will never end until that object is accomplished. We are going through with our task, so far as I am concerned, if it takes us three years longer.”
And that was Lincoln in June 1864 as the Union boys were dying like flies in Grant’s relentless assault, “the butcher.” Lincoln could say this at the moment when he thought he never could be reelected, these so many years not yet to victory. For his next national “vote of confidence” was but five months away. The point to you and me is, what mental direction thus enabled Lincoln then so to state? Though neither he nor the whole world yet had heard of the Science of it, could it possibly have been “direction by malicious minds”? What mental quality and substance, enabled Lincoln then in that so oft recurring dark hour, so to know and stand?
On this same June of ’64, in fact it was June 14th, Lincoln declared himself to a newsman, Noah Brooks: “I wish, when you write or speak to the people, you would do all you can to correct the impression that the war in Virginia will end right off (Grant then had just slipped across the Janes by Petersburg twenty-two miles south of Richmond-J) and victoriously. To me the most trying thing of all this war is that people are too sanguine; they expect too much at once. I declare to you, sir, that we are to-day farther ahead than I thought, one year and a half ago, than we should be; and yet there are plenty of people who believe that the war is about to be substantially closed. As God is my judge, I shall be satisfied if we are over the fight in Virginia within a year. (What a magnificent prescience-Lee surrendered at Appomattox April 9th, 1865-J). I hope we shall be ‘happily disappointed,’ as the saying is; BUT I AM AFRAID NOT-I AM AFRAID NOT.” (my caps, for what Lincoln seems to say, maybe meant to say, he was afraid that war would not
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end for approximately a year; but how true it was and he was,-I AM AFRAID NOT!) Otherwise, how could he have preserved the Union, even as we have found “the clear, correct teaching of Christian Science” in the understanding that shows itself forth as fearless standing one with God as the majority and All?
These two quotes by the way, are from Vol. 111, pages 52, and 59. On page 377, Sandburg as to the Quakers makes for us now, another moving point: “Answering a kindly letter from the Rhode Island Quakers, Lincoln acknowledged that he expected no reputation as a peace man while up to his arm-pits in war blood: ‘Engaged as I am in a great war, I fear it will be difficult for the world to understand how fully I appreciate the principles of peace inculcated in this letter by the Society of Friends.” That such true and perfect lovers of peace as the Quakers could send him from their Iowa organization, through Senator Harlan, an address voicing accord with him, was deeply moving. As though here were people whose basic thought and feeling required no particular appeals or corrections, as though his conscience at its roots ran with theirs, in phrases shaded with a faint glad music, he wrote the Iowa Quakers: ‘It is most cheering and encouraging for me to know that in the efforts which I have made, and am making, for the restoration of a righteous peace to our country, I am upheld and sustained by the goodwishes and prayers of God’s people. (On the side of direction by God-not malicious minds-J). No one is more deeply than myself aware that without His favor, our highest wisdom is but as foolishness, and that our most strenuous efforts would avail nothing in the shadow of His displeasure. It seems to me that if there be one subject upon which all good man may unitedly agree, it is in imploring the gracious favor of the God of nations upon the struggle our people are making for the preservation of their precious birthright of civil and religious liberty.”
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Now, you must be moved by that far-seeing statement of Abe Lincolns! Not only civil, BUT RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. What enabled Lincoln so to see and to stand? According to Sandburg, some clergymen tried to make a summary creed for Lincoln (p. 372-75), from Lincoln’s own words in his various statements. As Sandburg starts off: “In proclamation, in recommendation of thanksgiving or of fasting and prayer, in numerous references to God, Providence, the Almighty, the Common Father, sometimes having their meaning colored by special events or conditions, Lincoln had given the impression to a multitude that he might have a creed. At a later time a clergyman sought to formulate such a creed from Lincoln’s own words”.
Lincoln had no creed, as Mrs. Eddy uses the word. If in Christian Science we need a creed, take first all Mrs. Eddy has written, then her “Creedo” in Ret, her Platform in SCIENCE AND HEALTH, the Chapter on Recapitulation, and especially the Tenets. None of that is what the human mind defines and considers creed. But even this clergyman could not muss down A. Lincoln. To take a couple or so: “I believe it is fit and becoming in all people, at all times, to acknowledge and revere the supreme government of God to bow in humble submission to His chastisements, to confess and deplore their sins and transgressions, in the full conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. . . I believe in hopes authorized by the Divine teachings, that the united cry of the nation will be heard on High…I believe in Him whose will, not ours, should be done. I believe the people of the United States, in the forms approved by their own consciousness, should render the homage due the divine Majesty for the wonderful things He had done in the
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nation’s behalf, and invoke the influence of His holy Spirit to subdue anger. I believe in bounties so extraordinary they cannot fail to penetrate and soften the heart habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of God. I believe no human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out, these great things we have received; they are the gracious gifts of the Most High God…I believe in His eternal truth and justice. I believe the will of GOD prevails; without Him, all human reliance is vain; without the assistance of the divine Being I cannot succeed, with that assistance I cannot fail…I believe in praise to Almighty God, the beneficent Creator and Ruler of the universe.”
I recognize where quite a few of these come from, and you can see a bit of churchy stuffiness in this “creedal patching”, but it is not misleading, just some fair highlights. None of it contradicts SCIENCE AND HEALTH, and all of it contradicts ecclesiasticism in Mrs. Eddy’s founding of the Directors. The first rule in metaphysics is, start every thought from God, cause. Christian Science of course inevitably goes away beyond Lincoln, but how gloriously Lincoln ever starts with the first and one premise of Christian Science! God, the one Cause, His government and His controlling will.
Two of Lincoln’s finest, highest expressions of the reality of being, that so wonderfully illustrate what we know as its Science, occurred in 1862. That was the first bitter despondency to the North, for by Antietam in Sept. 20th ’62, it found its first full rounded hope of early victory and success shown as futile, and in Lincoln’s thinking not God’s way, that it should then end. In this founding study of Mrs. Eddy, I believe no two articles have stirred me more or as much, as her 1889 “The Way”, and her 1909, “The Way of Wisdom.”
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Both the North and the South had taken this War, although with great preliminary fear, somewhat lightly. In that each side expected early victory, though Southern arrogance and emotional conceit had from the outset doomed the South to the harsher and more bitter, seemingly, awakening. None of that belief ever really touched Lincoln. But as he made the primary stand, so he met and carried the burden of all the fear and hate. At every point, even in that debate with Douglas, he moved before others, and so as at Sumnter, when they first hauled down the Union Flag, Lincoln with God as first and governing was ahead of most of his countrymen in understanding, and ahead of about all his closer advisors and well intentioned friends. Standing on God as the governing Principle, he found himself in that glorious minority, where “Truth is first known by the fewness of its followers”, right in the middle of His line of light, that as Mrs. Eddy both shows and several times states, is linking all the ages in the one and immortal design of God.
The first of these two 1862 Lincoln statements comes just as the evidence came in that his first campaign, in May and June, to capture Richmond and end this heinous war at once, was likely to fail, if not already. This was Lincoln’s first great hope in the winning of the war. News had just come in that Jeb Stuart’s cavalry had cut completely around McClellan’s Arm, so laboriously carried by the Navy to the St. James peninsula, and now before Richmond. Jeb Stuart’s raid extraordinary at once had struck fear all over the north as to McClellan and what the Union now in June ’62 could accomplish, to take Richmond and quickly end this ever more disturbing-to the human mind-war. And before we look at
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Lincoln’s statement at this so fearful moment, it is well to remind ourselves of certain beliefs of McClellan. He was probably the most conceited general Lincoln ever had. He insulted the President at every convenient turn. He made Lincoln come to him, even at mid-night hours, and wait around to see him. His infinitude of arrogance, with minimum of humility in real understanding, was as heavy a load with Lincoln, as its correlated defeats under McClellan.
At this time in June ’62, the House Judiciary Committee called on Lincoln. One of its radical free-the-slave members, unaware of God’s first task to serve the Union, put his own sense of God to the President: “Slavery must be stricken down wherever it exists. If we do not do right I believe God will let us go our own way to our ruin.” As if as we now know in Christian Science, God ever knows ruin, let alone lets anyone ever go there! “But if we do right, I believe He will lead us safely out of the wilderness, crown our arms with victory, and restore our dissevered Union.” Lincoln was not of course taken in by this mental falsity at all, anymore than the metaphysician in Christian Science, is taken in, by the argument that,-to the patient-if you will only do this thing with your effect, whether a sensuous sin minor to large or reading the wrong books or not going to or joining a and the church, or any and all starting with effect to balance against an other supposed effect, so that all comes out right with God. You see of course that is what the member of the House Judiciary Committee in that first bitter hour of ’62 put up to Lincoln. Also, while we are on ’62, we might recall that is the year when Mrs. Eddy dates her first DIRECT mental stirring as Christian Science. Largely but not wholly given in her written corrections to Quimby, which of course later Q’s adherents tried to show Q. gave to our Leader and the sole founder of His scientific Word. (S.&H. preface).
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Lincoln replied to this dealer in right, as one effect balancing another; “My faith is greater than yours…I believe He will compel us to do right in order that He may do these things, not so much because we desire them as that they accord with His plan of dealing with this nation, in the midst of which He means to establish justice. I think He means that we shall do more than we have yet done in furtherance of His plans, and He will open the way for our doing it. I have felt His hand upon me in great trials and submitted to His guidance, and I trust that as He shall further open the way, I will be ready to walk therein, relying on His help and trusting in His goodness and wisdom.” (p. 380).
Who anywhere in the face of the negation of His goodness as All, ever can falter? Lincoln never did in his divinely appointed task. Nor did Mrs. Eddy in her final forever Scientific founding of the Science of His goodness! The highest and most difficult of all right tasks ever known on this earth. This statement above shows why Lincoln in June, as McClellan failed in what first great hope before Richmond, did not fail himself, in his conviction, as to Whom governed what in his every hour, the “every event of your career.” (Mary Baker Eddy). Soon was to come Sept., and McClellan’s again great failure, the negative pressure now higher in the “boiler valve” of fear and hate. At this point so far as I now know of what authentically Lincoln has left, this is to the Christian Scientist Lincoln’s highest genuine metaphysical statement, in his own integrity with God, his conviction in his innate true being, that whether God moves positively or negatively, He is All, moving all to His own and one righteous purpose and end, wholly and beyond all personality and personal sense.
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The very failure of McClellan in June ’62 before Richmond, led Lee to make his first invasion of “the North”, at Frederick, Md., early in Sept. Lee was, as they say in baseball, pretty well off base. McC. having given that confidence to Lee. McC. moved in on his own ground, with great superior forces, and as McC pursued, the final test came, Sept. 20th, ’62 at Antietam right above Harper’s Ferry. Again all this horror of war, between “blood-brothers in the self-same faith” could be and should have been ended. McC. could not get what he should have up on that hill that morning of the twentieth, high above the Potomac, he should have; he could not pursue the weary and frightened Lee, in the few miles to chop him to pieces. Lee got his army across that Potomac, just west of the Ferry. In this respect, catching Lee before he again crossed the Potomac, it was a duplicate of the next year and Lee’s second “Northern” invasion; Meade after Gettysburg with Lee even weaker let him escape again.
Ah, in ’62 and the second and bitterest hour to Lincoln! What did Lincoln say? Well, this one at that moment, after Lee got away at Antietam, Lincoln put this statement in his private files, just his own personal recording as to himself, where he stood with his God: “The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. (Page the eccles. directors in their remarkable double-talk-J). In the present civil war, it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and
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wills that it shall not yet end. By His more great power on the minds of the now contestants. He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest.”
Before I finish the last two sentences of this marvelous statement by Lincoln to himself, of how God governs and moves both positively and negatively, let me here impose: How easily also Mrs. Eddy could in the Manual or elsewhere have left that hard and fast direction, as you have well brought out. Lincoln must have seen the very same thing. God could have stopped it from starting. He could have ended it any time. That is if He were an anthromorphic God, instead of the divine, inflexible Principle of infinite Love. Without the Science, having the conviction of God’s all-power and supreme governing, no matter what his fear and heartache, Lincoln knew God must be working out His way of eternal rightness. His conclusion of his statement after Antietam, when Lee’s escape back across the Potomac made another year of war a practical certainty is: “Yet the contest began. And having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any way. Yet the contest proceeds.” It was well Lincoln put that statement in his private file, where his secretaries found it after his death. The North hardly could have taken it. Even to-day, nearly forty years after Mrs. Eddy’s completion of her full founding, the Christian Science movement with all the Science, is just beginning to get its glimpse of this great spiritual fact.
One of the old Sentinels has a wonderful statement of Lincoln’s. I got a photostat of it, but it is not at hand now. This clear vision and deep conviction that Lincoln had, of God’s allness and supreme sole control in governing the whole earth, is one of the mightiest pillars in Christian Science, and encouraging and refresh-
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ing to every Christian Scientist. I though it would especially interest you and ….now, for here indeed also is a mighty interpretation of the spirit of our government. The President who did most to preserve this Union and its government, I believe has given it its best spiritual interpretation-apart of course from Christian Science as the line of light-as our government, the very substance of its Declaration, of its Constitution, and its Bill of Rights, the first article of which guarantees religious freedom.
In crises and mighty wranglings over fundamental Principle, humor seems to be one of God’s gracious mesmeric destroyers. Mrs. Eddy evinced a very high degree of humor in and out of her classes. When I got to Boston in 1920, I learned one of the proofs that HWE was of the devil was, that he wore gay vests and a smiling face. It was believed such conduct was as out of order as at a funeral. We all know of course of Lincoln’s steady use of humor, in and out of his cabinet, all through that terrible war. Ecclesiasticism always wears a long face and uses a heavy hand. But the conviction of God’s presence as the only presence, and His good as All and the sole reality, can hardly get anyone down. Here is one story I find in going over this material, Sandburg credits Lincoln with telling:
“Two Quakeresses in a railway coach were overheard in a conversation:
“I think Jefferson Davis will succeed.
“Why does thee think so?
“Because Jefferson Davis is a praying man
“And so is Abraham Lincoln a praying man.
“Yes, but the Lord will think Abraham is joking.” (367).
I am keeping my eye on legal aspects of the two Trusts and the Manual, but the ’98 Trust especially, somewhat along the lines
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I wrote you recently. I should think the basic legal aspects are two: the legal responsibility under a public charitable trust, and your rights as an American citizen under the Constitution and Federal law.
We are finding some lovely days again in the country. Mary joins in kindest regards. By all means use up all your old paper on me. As you say, if it is right for you to be on the Potomac in Oct., you’ll be there. We are looking forward to a fore-gathering.
(signed) Joseph E. Johnston
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[Ed. Note: The following refers to “A LETTER” which is included in Mr. Eustace’s book entitled
“Christian Science Its ‘Clear Correct Teaching’ and Complete Writings” which references God’s negative.
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NEW YORK CITY
8 Nov., ’47 – Sat.
Dear—
The fact as you say, you are meeting earnest Christian Scientists everywhere who feel the necessity to break away from organization, simply shows they are beginning to see that material organization in Christian Science is not what organization in Christian Science is, and what Mrs. Eddy must have founded. It is evidence of real spiritual growth in Christian Science. It is on more illustration of God’s negative moving to maintain His allness as Christian Science. For most Christian Scientists to begin to see spiritual organization in contrast to material organization, God has had to appear to move negatively as ecclesiasticism for over thirty-five years, and especially since 1922. I see this moving as the so-called Christian Science movement.
You speak in your own case of the past 18 months, quietly pondering Christian Science and its true church, standing aside for the while from what had appeared to you as the world of Christian Science. You can be most grateful for accepting God’s guidance in doing this. Here indeed is a vital phase in the practice of genuine Christian Science, and of invariable historic experience in man’s important forward steps with God as his Mind. For the both of us, let me pause a moment to review briefly the subject.
Every thinking Christian Scientist knows, certainly in his heart, that the real practice of Christian Science is in his aloneness and oneness with God. Thus at the outside in SCIENCE AND HEALTH, we are reminded of Jesus instruction: “When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and, when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.”; and SCIENCE AND HEALTH explains: “The closet typifies the sanctuary of Spirit, the door of which shuts out sinful sense but lets in Truth, Life, and Love. Closed to error, it is open to Truth, and vice versa. The Father in secret is unseen to the physical senses, but He knows all things and rewards according to motives, not according to speech. To enter into the heart of prayer, the door of the erring senses must be closed. Lips must be mute and materialism silent, that man may have audience with Spirit, the divine Principle, Love, which destroys all error. In order to pray aright, we must enter into the closet and shut the door. We must close the lips and silence the material senses. In the quiet sanctuary of earnest longings, we must deny sin and plead God’s allness.” (15).
Possibly Mrs. Eddy’s most succinct statement of the only basis of Christian Science practice, and so “the fundamental principle for growth in Christian Science”, (Ret. 49), is her: “The Christian Scientist is alone with his own being and the reality of things.” (Mes. ’01:20:8-9). This whole paragraph is a “bulls-eye” for all Christian Scientists who have yet to see God’s negative moving in Christian Science as ecclesiasticism in reverse, as every negation perfectly proclaims God and His moving just that way. Only thus can God be found as all there is to both positive and negative, and so All-in-all, hence “being ours practically, guiding our every thought and action.” (Ret. 28). Mrs. Eddy once named this Message to her Mother
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Church “Infinite Personality”, and called it the best of her three 20th Century Messages to her Mother Church. When Mrs. Eddy laid the Corner-stone to her own individual church, the Concord Church, as type of her basic, permanent oneness as man or church, in contrast to her temporary personal, institutional mothering (1876-1906), in the reading she had included, the paragraph from Mis. 127, instructs again in the how and what of practice or prayer in Christian Science, with the certainty that then “great growth in Christian Science will follow”. (My. 18).
I am not just trying to “lard” in quotations here. It is simply that the one basis of work in Christian Science is so fundamental, especially in reversing ecclesiasticism, the churches’ obedience to the Manual, and what A LETTER calls Mrs. Eddy’s “wake-up” commands for this 20th Century. It is good to compare together all these wonderful statements for our guidance. In thinking, or writing a letter in Science, indeed as this basic fact of oneness in Science compels, I find I am writing quite as much to myself as to another, for all is and must be right here embraced as Mind, the one infinite consciousness as the sole, real cause of my conscious being.
Here you are now in Boston, the “so-called home of the Christian Science movement”, as one letter-writer to the Curtis “Holiday” November issue expressed it, in protest over a previous article on Boston for having failed to mention the Mother Church edifice and its Extension. Here malicious mind is saying that Mrs. Eddy’s Mother Church is a material organization, absolutely dependent on certain organized material activities, the doing of these particular things, and on the control by a Board of five humans in all that pertains to Christian Science,-and indeed what does not pertain to all-embracing, infinite Christian Science?-all the churches and, so the claim is, all who are permitted to take the name of Christian Science. And so deeply is this belief of malicious mind directed and accepted, that since Mrs. Eddy’s passing, and especially after the great Trial, ending by early 1922, what calls itself the Christian Science movement, to maintain this belief in material organization, instead of spiritual formation in Christian Science (Ret. 49), such Christian Scientists have had to obey the human mind and human will, and disobey the 30 to 40 Manual sections, wherein Mrs. Eddy completely and fully at her giving up control and personal direction, dissolves both the material Mother Church government and every one of its material activities. Of course you know this was not a command by Mrs. Eddy to give up anything, but to go forward on this one and only basis of oneness in Christian Science to the fulfillment in its real practice.
Mrs. Eddy never left the slightest basis or excuse at anytime, for even an instant, for the Christian Scientist being fooled by mesmerism into accepting her Mother Church and her activity with it as material organization and activity. In 1891 Nov., in the first edition of Ret., she prophesied if her Mother Church should again appear to be materially organized, that appearance would be temporary, just to complete its work of history. In May 1892, as Mrs. Eddy was rapidly moving with her plan for temporary reorganization, accomplished as you know Sept., 23rd., ’92, she wrote her Clerk, Wm. B. Johnson, for his guidance in forwarding her plans with her followers-the 1879 Church since Dec. 2, 1899 had had no organized or recorded membership–: “Do not come under any obligations not to disorganize when the time comes; remember this.” (Mrs. Eddy’s underlining”).
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Mrs. Eddy’s great battle that summer to keep all church property out of church proper (see Mis. 139-42), was above all so that she herself could dissolve to what belief considered organization, when she completed her full founding in the personal mothering. That Mrs. Eddy kept her 1891 prophecy and pre-instructions is of course fully established in all the Manual estoppels that unite as one to do just that. The Christian Science movement will see this more dramatically and consistently even, when they see that at each stage, first in the ’92 reorganization, and then from ’95 on in the Manual, as she gave church voting powers, under her absolute control and direction, to these By-Law Mother Church directors, in contrast to the powers given in her permanent Sept. 1`st ’92 Deed, and augmented in 1901 by her permanent Will,-at every gift of such then authority or institution of Mother Church activity, Mrs. Eddy at the very inception of it, coupled right with it, each and every one of these now “abandoned” By-Laws that as A LETTER so excellently brings out, positively do NOT do this.
If Mrs. Eddy as she repeatedly says, could not do the work for another, again and again, the time has arrived for Christian Scientists each to do his own work, then how can Boston or a Board do it for another, let alone a whole movement, destined Mrs. Eddy says if we are faithful in the practice of this aloneness and oneness, to embrace and sweep Christendom and its world? What may seem to many Scientists confusing if not inexplicable, in these estoppels, Mrs. Eddy here really has given such an infinite blessing, that in the end the repentance and humility will reach so deep as to make up in what may seem a badly lagging 20th Century time-schedule, in the glorious achieving inevitable to the oneness that is the very power of God expressed, the im-manual or God with us.
Without this dissolving, to those who do not see and disobey, the keystone of real Christian Science practice, for both the churches as well as the individual, is gravely impaired if not destroyed. On the very face of it to anyone, all the Manual by-law estoppages are abandoned and disobeyed. But it is just as evident that in the disobedience that is the acceptance of Boston control and direction, the numerous and so vastly important By-Laws for the absolute protection and guidance of the churches are abandoned just as fully and so reversed and nullified. No church is permitted to interfere with another church, and above all this applies to The First Church in Boston. Mrs. Eddy puts this in the very first edition of the Manual, in the second edition words it practically as it now is. Except that in 1903, when she took her first steps in dissolving the Mother Church organization, to make this forbidding more emphatic and specific, she added the word “general”, so that it now reads “shall assume no general official control of other churches”. (Man. 70).
The two positive things that stand out in the spiritual guidance of the Manual, is the founding and protecting of the free, absolutely self-governing churches, and the full individual guidance that makes the Manual the 20th Century, as Mrs. Eddy called it in 1903, and the scientific moral document for all men and all time. To surrender in the slightest control or direction to Boston or others is to impair
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and destroy the latter. For the churches in the slightest to surrender their own entire self-government and individual church Mind-governing and tending business, as so fully founded in the Manual, is to accomplish the same impairment and destruction.
Why as you know, the Manual 1) forbids the directors to discipline a single local church member, and 2) forbids local church members from reporting or sending notices to the Mother Church. (Man. 52-55). Also the provisions for obeying Matt. 18 (20-21) have to be disobeyed to carry on this forbidden Boston control as discipline. You say you came into Christian Science after the great Trial starting in 1919. But when you see its history with the churches, you will see they threw right out the Manual provisions confining each church to its own (Man. 70). Churches from all over joined under the banner of the New York Executive Committee, donated over $100,000, in one way or another they constantly descended on Boston to influence the Court, and to force wholesale abandoning of the periodicals. All this Manual forbidden extra-curricular activity without a doubt made the Court conclude that if it did not give in to this central Boston control, for the directors to be the supreme governing authority as the movement seemed to demand, the Publishing Society would be destroyed and there would be no 1898 Deed of Trust for the Court to defend and protect.
Now Mrs. Eddy in the Manual, in both her positives and negatives, gives all the direction and protection to have avoided all that, to save the so-called movement from temporarily bowing down to the human mind, and so malicious mind as king. Those positive provisions for the churches, and those estoppel provisions dissolving the material Mother Church into its “real Christian compact”, its “spiritual bond”, its “spiritual formation” or “spiritually organized church”, are still and now right there as the eternity of this Manual, giving the same direction and protection, and as A LETTER says, only awaiting the Christian Scientists’ adoption and acceptance.
All these directions, this spiritual guidance in the Manual, come down to the one simple fundamental and basis in Christian Science, the aloneness and oneness in its real and only practice. There is and can be no other practice of Christian Science. All else and departure must and will involve dilution with human opinion and belief, the attempt to mix matter with Mind, the failure to understand Science that “translates matter into Mind, rejects all other theories of causation, restores the spiritual and original meaning of the Scriptures and explains the teachings and life of our Lord. It is religion’s “new tongue” “with sign’s following”, spoken of by St. Mark. It gives God’s infinite meaning to mankind”. (Mis. 25). All these Manual positives and negatives indeed give to and guide the Christian Scientist in “God’s infinite meaning”.
Now for a very brief look at history in this spiritual standing aside and alone, as you speak of your recent experience. As SCIENCE AND HEALTH so perfectly affirms, we know that every spiritual advance and mile-post is the Abraham quality, the Mind-going forth into the land we know not of (in material sense), the come out and be ye separate (from any belief in or acceptance of malicious mind). It was true with Abraham that this going forth alone with his spiritual sense measured and was the exact and inevitable measure of his “fidelity”, his “faith in the divine Life and in the eternal Principle of being”, that
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this alone gave him and increased his “trust in good”, and so maintained and protected him with “the life-preserving power of spiritual understanding”. (579).
The whole of Mind-spiritual history, in and out of the Bible, and in each Christian Scientist’s experience, every time has illustrated and proved this alone going forth. At twelve Jesus had gone forth beyond this powerful bind of material family sense. As the perfect exemplar, his whole Gospel record, and what he dictated to John as Revelation, infinitely illustrates it. One of Mrs. Eddy’s most inspiring and guiding passages, to me, sums this in essence: “Hence the human Jesus had a resort to his higher self and relation to the Father, and there could find rest from unreal trials in the conscious reality and royalty of his being,-holding the mortal as unreal, and the divine as real. It was the retreat from material to spiritual self-hood which recuperated him for triumph over sin, sickness, and death. Had he been as conscious of these evils as he was of God, wherein there is no consciousness of human error, Jesus could not have resisted them; nor could he have conquered the malice of his foes, rolled away the stone from the sepulchre, and risen from a higher concept than that in which he appeared at his birth.” (No. 36).
Nor can we. For his is the Way, and the way now and forever scientifically founded as the one practice of Christian Science, the oneness of God and man as All, He is both noumenon and phenomenon. It is most interesting to note that NO AND YES, as indeed all Mrs. Eddy’s greatest metaphysical works, apart from SCIENCE AND HEALTH, and part of Ret., were given by Mrs. Eddy to the field in 1887. As Mrs. Eddy states, she started in 1886 to close down on Boston as such and move to her world founding, in fact in 1883 she had founded the Journal whose purpose was to speed and record this. So we find Mrs. Eddy giving this vital individual instruction to foster and protect this individual aloneness and oneness in going forth, before she started in 1888, materially to dissolve her own official positions into the spiritual bond only, and to launch the founding of the churches to the world in June 1889. Immediately within the year, vastly to speed this aloneness and oneness, Mrs. Eddy in turn dissolved the material bond of each of the four organizations, she had used to launch the churches, into the true spiritual bond only in this Science of divine Love. (Note A LETTER p. 6).
Those metaphysical works by the way, as you recall, are Rud., No, Un., and under Mind Healing in Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy had given in ’85 and ’86, with still another revision in ’88, much of Ret., especially relating to malicious animal magnetism. Mrs. Eddy’s four organizations, the one purpose of all of which culminated in the launching of the churches in ’89, as self-governing for the unfettered, individual oneness in practice of Christian Science, were in order: Mrs. Eddy’s own C.S.A. in 1876, her Boston Church in ’79, her own teaching College in ’82 (Charter was in ’81), and her National Association (N.C.S.A.) in 1886.
You recall all the way through it was with Mrs. Eddy, spiritually going forward in what appeared alone, but what was always in reality her divine oneness, revealing and founding Christian Science. Upon her final, direct, positive discovery in 1866, and soon had, as she explains, for three years as it seemed to go on and out alone. In ’72, Kennedy could not and would not see her uncovering of evil as animal magnetism, the unreversed negation, so again as it seemed alone
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for three years, Mrs. Eddy in oneness gave us our glorious SCIENCE AND HEALTH. It was the aloneness as it seems, again in ’82 when Dr. Eddy left her, the experience she says which revealed to both her in the founding, and to the Dr. before he passed, the absolute sine-qua-non in handling and reversal of malicious mental malpractice. No rule in Christian Science can I think be held more vital. In 1890, as you know from the introduction to “Whoso”, Mrs. Eddy had to stop the public discussion of this by her followers, saying a half century would be necessary before Christian Scientists could retain their sense of Love in the mastering, sufficiently for public discussion. Whoso of course came in about the fiftieth year, not only with its specific chapter p. 113 on The Personality of the M.M.M., but with this vital rule exemplified in the whole book.
Many more examples can be drawn from Mrs. Eddy’s glorious forty-five years’ in the full founding of the word and institution, but it was all the same, as with Abraham and right down, as with the coming out and founding that is the real America, and as with each of us in our real forward spiritual steps. In each case the aloneness was the appearing, the oneness the reality, and in every instance the new is always a larger sense of creation, of man and the universe, surely of what SCIENCE AND HEALTH means, when it speaks of His unfolding as “the infinite idea forever developing itself, broadening and rising higher and higher from a boundless basis”. (258). But with Mrs. Eddy, her major withdrawal period is thought of as 1889, when she withdrew or retired from Boston.
That was really, when you see each step as she took it, and how she explained it, her dissolving of her “official” material status into the greater one of the spiritual, voluntary bond and activity. Not a withdrawing or retiring, as the mind that conceives material organization conceives, but the spiritual fulfilling in the “rising higher”, what Mrs. Eddy in 1909 described for the churches’ activity as “the spiritual fullness of God, Spirit, even the divine idea of Christian Science…a wholly spiritual foundation…the spiritual foundation”. (My. 356). And Mrs. Eddy here, to the heart of the understanding and practice that is Christian Science, and that all Christian Scientists desire, says: “This simple statement of oneness is the only possible correct version of Christian Science.”
But Mrs. Eddy herself perfectly describes this what is thought of as “retiring” in 1889. It was not at all, of course, retiring, anymore than with Abraham, but the going forth to compel her followers to dissolve much more the material sense of her leadership and mothering for the spiritual sense, to find its basis in the spiritual bond of oneness: “When I retired from the field of labor, it was a departure, socially, publicly, and finally, from the routine of such material modes of society and our societies demand. Rumors are rumors,-nothing more. I am still with you on the field of battle, taking forward marches, broader and higher views, and with the hope that you will follow.” (Mis. 136). That whole statement from line 1 to 21 is more of the same, concluding with “All our thoughts should be given to the absolute demonstration of Christian Science.”
“And with the hope that you will follow”. That following, that “absolute demonstration”, is the aloneness that is the oneness, “the only possible correct version of Christian Science.” What else can
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Christian Scientists think Mrs. Eddy means with these estoppels, and these “alone” directions to the churches, except to follow her in this departure from “the routine of such material modes”, “taking forward marches broader and higher views”, “the spiritual foundation”?
What a church is dedicated to, surely is its essence, what it is. Mrs. Eddy has defined her mothering church in far more than the Dedication Address, but surely he there must find her perfect statement of what it is. What doe he find? Not a scintilla of material organization or material sense. He finds the oneness that is the practice of Christian Science, which the Manual enjoins and protects with its estoppels, dissolving all Mother Church material organization and material doing-as you so aptly put it, “demonstration appears to them to be doing something to something”-into the Mother Church voluntary association of the spiritual bond of divine Love.
Mrs. Eddy reorganized her Mother Church in ’92 for the sole purpose to bring to world acceptance and founding, the churches she had launched in ’89, for the world practice of the oneness that is Christian Science: “there is a thought higher and deeper than the edifice…”The real house in which ‘we live, and move, and have our being’ is Spirit, God, the eternal harmony of infinite Soul. The enemy we confront would overthrow this sublime fortress, and it behooves us to defend our heritage. How can we do this Christianly Scientific work? By intrenching ourselves in the knowledge that our true temple is no human fabrication, but the superstructure of Truth, reared on the foundation of Love, and pinnacled in Life. Such being its nature, how can our godly temple be demolished, or even disturbed? Can eternity end? Can Life die? Can Truth be uncertain? Can Love be less than boundless?…Know, then, that you possess sovereign power to think and act rightly, and that nothing can dispossess you of this heritage and trespass on Love. If you maintain this position, who or what can cause you to sin or suffer? Our surety is in our confidence that we are indeed dwellers in Truth and Love, man’s heavenly mansion. Such a heavenly assurance ends all warfare, and bids tumult cease, for the good fight we have waged is over, and divine Love gives us the true sense of victory…Is not a man metaphysically number one, a unit, and therefore whole number, governed and protected by his divine Principle, God? You have simply to preserve a scientific, positive sense of unity with your divine source, and daily demonstrate this.” (Pul. 2-4).
Now where in all this is there material organization or any material sense or belief whatsoever? “Something doing something to something”? No, at the outset defining it in its dedication, Mrs. Eddy says her Mother Church is the spiritual activity of man in his individual oneness with his divine Principle. Mrs. Eddy concludes, this Mother Church is home, heaven. Can heaven ever be in material organization, or in the human sense of anything? It is not and cannot be, of course. In the Manual estoppels, Mrs. Eddy is directing and saying, now here go from matter to Mind, and find the Mother Church and its Manual for what it was and is, guidance in the real practice of Christian Science, maintaining your oneness with Him who is All, and so what really is and is all that is (CCT.263).
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I must end this letter, which is more an article than a letter, on this page. But if you have it, look up Mrs. Eddy’s wonderful statement of oneness which Whoso quotes 189-90, practically at its end. Also, in A LETTER, p. 7, that wonderful paragraph for the practitioner and the movement, in which is quoted Mrs. Eddy’s “An acknowledgment of the perfection of the infinite Unseen confers a power nothing else can”. (Un. 7). If you should look up CCT263, compare it with Un. 7:22-26.
In the long history of Christian Science, as they went out into this Science, their friends turned on and from them. So did the movement, in 1919, to those who went forth then standing for the government and supreme authority of Principle, divine Love. But that aloneness was only the way it appeared. The oneness of Christian Science being practiced, God graciously and lovingly was protecting, as he did Moses and Jesus as babes, until the spiritual fullness appeared. It was that staying within the fortress, and always is that staying, that Mrs. Eddy in Pul. 2, so perfectly sets forth. This is the gracious direction and protection you have had these months, and in feeling “miles away from it all, what are really feeling is the larger sense of your divine and glorious oneness, our “sovereign power”. All these years of God’s ecclesiastical moving in the Christian Science movement, as it has seemed, in fact and absolutely has been the steady “rising higher and higher from its boundless basis”, of the oneness of Christian Science practice, the rising discernment of “the clear, correct teaching of Christian Science.” (My. 297). Ask yourself, How much more glorious is your rising sense in Christian Science these past few years, than what may have seemed as the previous sense of stagnation and spiritual frustration? The latter if so, was a negation unreversed; the now such negation reversed shows only His footsteps preparing you for another Abraham adventure, going forth anew spiritually.
Mrs. Eddy’s forty-five years of founding Christian Science on earth, is the most perfect example the world has known, of oneness, the seamless founding garment. A LETTER also perfectly states this, Jesus of course was the very same, only as the Example and exemplar. See My. 338: 23-27. In your aloneness these years, you are also discovering the understanding of evil in Christian Science. You have been entering its highest mystery-and the world’s, too-understanding of the negation and its reversal. From Mrs. Eddy’s first experience with a Christian Scientist in 1872 with Richard Kennedy, on this subject, until her instructions to Adam Dickey not long before her departure, Mrs. Eddy strove mightily to get Scientists to understand how to handle, that is reverse, malicious mental malpractice, and as constantly to the end bewailed their ignorance. Have you thought about it, that in almost every line of her works, Mrs. Eddy is reversing all negation and negative words? She uses them all from the standpoint of God’s allness, or we would not have Christian Science.
Sincerely,
Joseph E. Johnston
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New York
18 Nov., ’47-Tues.
Dear – – – –
You have a most kindly heart and a most loving desire to help others. God will bless that desire in His infinite Love, as with us all, just as we hold it all right here at the point of His allness, destroying the lie that malicious mind is, and is doing something to someone over there. CCT.143-144. In the opening Preface page to Mis., Mrs. Eddy gives an idea of the great helpfulness Christian Science enables one to show forth to his fellowman.
You spoke of a dizziness condition. A lie specifically reversed is bound to give way to the truth to which it points, from which alone it can negatively borrow. All negative statement is seeming, but pointing right to the reality and fact thus imitated or misstated. (S. & H. 267; 19-28, Un. 36:4-20, Un. 20:1-4, Mis. 60:26-6, Un. 53: 1-4, Mis. 218; 5-10, ‘02.19:23-25.) Now, suppose to shorten this letter by referring to quotes instead of giving them, we go down the line a bit on healing in this Science according to its one teaching, one Principle, one rule, in short according to “its clear, correct teaching”? We can do it with some questions. These are just a few pointed citations at random. Our Leader’s works are full of them.
When is the healing, or what is the healing point in treatment?”: S& H. 411:10-12; 454 31-2; 411:32-1; 418:20-25; 395:6-14; Mis. 359:5-7; Un. 7:6-26; CCT Dis. of C.S. In all the specific treatments analyzed in CCT. in the chapter, Factors in Healing, each case concludes, that is the healing comes, at the point of realization: “Lay the axe at the root of this falsity by the realization that there is one Mind only, and that one infinite; one presence, power and intelligence; and that therefore there is no room for a malicious mind either to be, or to operate hypnotically, as presence, power, intelligence, or as any other lie. This realization is the spontaneous healing of any claim.” (205).
What is the work to be done?: S&H. 412:16-18; 399:29-28; 168:24-29; 169:16-31; 225:23-13; 227:3-13; 229:15-22; 230:30-7; 377:16- to-382-4; 226:22-2; Ret. 31:13-4; Ret. 86:7-16; S&H. 14: 12-30. CCT covers this ground 118-132.
How does the metaphysician do the work? S&H. 14:31-18; 311:27-32; 412:1-9; 208:26-24; 373:1-26; 412:18-27; 414:19-31; 418:16-20; 418: 5-11; 151:20-5; 156:28-10; 166:3-7; 167:1-12; 228:11-27; 231: 20-2; 242:9-14; 274:23-24 (275); Hea. 19:1-15; Rud. 13:18-22; Whoso 119-120; and Mis. 116:20-24. You may find other references you like even better, but take every negation that comes to you in this argument, and reverse it with the spiritual fact thus negated. The practice of Christian Science is getting to, or discerning “the spiritual fact of whatever the material senses behold; the basis of immortality. (S&H. 585). Your consciousness and your conscious being is never dizzy or uncertain, for consciousness is one and infinite, and you are the conscious awareness of this infinite is. Awareness of God is your real being, and the one law of reversal is His law spontaneously reversing and destroying whatever negates or denies your real awareness.
As you know, God uses the negative to give His final, full meaning on each unfoldment of mankind, as with Jacob, S&H. 308, or all the way in Mrs. Eddy’s founding. He uses both positive and negative to enforce and maintain His absolute infinity, as Mis. 57, and 172. Let us rejoice then at every opportunity, and go forward in His law (Rud. 1-4), in the practice of His prayer (No. 31:17-22, and 39:18-24).
Very sincerely yours,
Joseph E. Johnston
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New York
30 Nov., ’47-Sunday
Dear —-
Marriage relations, family life, divorce, are now filling the news in articles, organization meetings, individual views, and in particular a ream of psychiatric practice and psychoanalysis. Certainly no association is more important, than man and woman, and no contract as fruitful in its full achieving as marriage. No wonder, then thought in this field is deeply stirred, and everywhere, belief is seeking here happiness and successful living.
As you know, the major base of psychiatry for all its practice, is sex. In one way or another it tries to correlate all disturbance to sex disturbance or some uncovered phase. This is especially magnified in such analysis of marriage. All kinds of material beliefs are thrown into the hopper, in the effort to twist here and balance there into some solution of harmony.
Now, Christian Science makes this whole business far more simple. It also makes it far more truly soluble, for it bases it all on God as Principle, and finds every solution in simple oneness. With the one, real consciousness as husband, wife, child, home, family, the absolute harmony this consciousness is conscious of, is found to be omnipresent, the present and real experience. See CCT., pages 46-52. Mrs. Eddy perfectly states it: “God is our Father and our Mother, our Minister and the great Physician; He is man’s only real relative on earth and in heaven.” (Mis. 151:13).
Old religious orthodox thought, believing in a God that is not here but off somewhere, says that is all fine, but I want a wife here and a happy home now, one that is real, not just “metaphysical” fluff theory. All such thinking is asleep to being and reality, and should wake-up, stop its ignorant dreaming. God can no more be without its idea which expresses Him, than the sun without its beam, its radiating light. How can consciousness be without what it is conscious of, without conscious being? What and where is man? Conscious being, and right at the point of consciousness. What can one as conscious being deal with except his consciousness? Christian Science reveals the basic and glorious truth that what one accepts as consciousness determines alone the discord or harmony. Christian Science scientifically reveals what God as the one real consciousness is, and His one rule of oneness in practice. Jesus said, I came not to destroy but to fulfil, and the Mind he perfectly showed forth, as our example and exemplar, is the one real way to fulfil and perfect this world-wide desire for a happy marriage and a happy home.
I defy any sincere Christian anywhere to find a statement on marriage equal in wisdom and spiritual depth, to the chapter on Marriage in SCIENCE AND HEALTH. This chapter is Mrs. Eddy’s practical application of the Science of the Mind “that was in Christ Jesus” to marriage. The fundamentals here are sure-fire, for they scientifically have all the power of God and infinite reality back of them. My whole married experience is in line with and proof of this statement in SCIENCE AND HEALTH: “Separation never should take place, and it never would, if both husband and wife were genuine Christian Scientists. Science inevitably lifts one’s being higher in the scale of harmony and happiness.” (59-60)
We cannot just say, well, if you’ll be one, I’ll be one. This Science is man’s oneness now with God, so each one must accept his own responsibility now. Among the several, many in fact, simple positive and negatives for joyous companionship, these seem to me to be the first foundation stones, that by which to measure the fulfilling of this deep longing and necessity of mankind:
1) “Union of masculine and feminine qualities constitutes completeness…These different elements conjoin naturally with each other, and their true harmony is in spiritual oneness.” (57)
2) “Unity of spirit gives new pinions of joy, or else joy’s drooping wings trail in the dust…Unselfish ambition, noble life-motives, and purity,-these constituents of thought, mingling, constitute individually and collectively true happiness, strength, and permanent…Home is the dearest place on earth, and it should be the centre, though not the boundary, of the affections.” (58)
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(3) “There should be the most tender solicitude for each other’s happiness, and mutual attention and approbation should wait on all the years of married life…Fulfilling the different demands of their united spheres, their sympathies should blend in sweet confidence and cheer, each partner sustaining the other,-thus hallowing the union of interests and affections, in which the heart finds peace and home…A mutual understanding should exist before this union and continue ever after, for deception is fatal to happiness.” (59)
4) “Kindred tastes, motives, and aspirations are necessary to the formation of a happy and permanent companionship. The beautiful in character is also the good, welding indissolubly the links of affection…The scientific morale of marriage is spiritual unity…Marriage should signify a union of heart.” (60, 61, 64).
5) “If the foundations of human affection are consistent with progress, they will be strong and enduring.” (65).
So we look for the masculine and feminine qualities that join naturally in spiritual oneness, for unity of spirit, for unselfish ambition, noble life-motives, purity, tender solicitude and approbation, a union of interests and affections that puts the heart above all in the home, kindred tastes, motives and aspirations, affection welded in character, a union of hearts. What other kind of companionship and marriage, can one possibly imagine, can and does bring real harmony and happiness?
You wrote me that it was hard for you to understand…., that she had some fine qualities, but seemed so selfish, thinking of herself rather than another. You said you had tried sincerely to make her happy, and to mark your marriage with harmony, but…did not see what you offered as you saw it. One thing is sure, if you are seeking the true qualities of God, all this that this chapter so accurately describes, it cannot be denied you, for it is the very presence to God, who is All-in-all, your real Mind or consciousness now. If your wife is seeking wealth, more wealth than you have, neither of you will find happiness in that, and you can be glad you haven’t got it: “Beauty, wealth, or fame is incompetent to meet the demands of the affections, and should never weigh against the better claims of intellect, goodness, and virtue.” (57).
SCIENCE AND HEALTH goes on to say: “The education of the higher nature is neglected, and other considerations,-passion, frivolous amusements, personal adornment, display, and pride,-occupy thought…physical sense, not discerning the true happiness of being, places it on a false basis.” (60). We must each ask ourselves, for each alone can answer, What have we in our heart been looking for? Have we been looking for beauty, display, wealth, fame in matter instead of Mind, have we been looking to material sense instead of to what expresses Spirit, to the qualities that blend, the character that holds its weld, the union in the heart?
Of one great and joyous thing, you can be absolutely certain. The perfection and fulfillment of all you desire is right at hand. It is the present reality for you. God is All-in-all, so He embraces your every desire, and so necessarily is omnipresent in His expression of your all for you. Do you doubt this? Do you believe that what you deeply desire is not and may not be given you? In his last book, published after the one I sent you which I refer to as CCT, the other one I refer to as Whoso-its full title is Whoso Readeth Let Him Understand (See Matt. 24:15)-this statement Mrs. Eddy gave to a class is quoted: “You may falsely think that something stands between you and your heart’s desire, and so go through life here with that desire unfilled, but it is not so. Deny it, and you will find yourself free; and good will begin to flow to you and you will see clearly that nothing can stand between you and your own. Lean on God. Trust Him. Understand Him, and He will give you foresight, wisdom, and a capacity to execute His will, and show forth His name.”
Mrs. Eddy also has said: “To affirm anything is to assert its possibility-to assert it even in the face of all contrary evidence,” and “by affirming that to be true, but which to all human reasoning or sight seems not true at all, you can bring it to pass.” And finally, the very law of your own true being: “When you reach out to the beyond for the real, you instantly express it.” (Whoso 19-20). This must be so, if God is infinite, embraces all, and is omnipresent and omnipotent. In the Unity of Good, p. 10, Mrs. Eddy declares: “If
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there is any monopoly in my teaching, it lies in the utter reliance upon the one God, to whom belong all things.” Plenty of Christians and Christian Scientists speak earnestly of reliance on God, but the “catch” or Science here, is to take back and give to God as consciousness, all things of which one is conscious.
Just as Jesus taught us, we must take our every desire in secret to Him, that is, take it consciously, in silent knowing, verbally to yourself, if you want, to our heavenly, real, divine consciousness, and He who sees in secret must reward us openly, for this consciousness is the one cause of our conscious being, so to acknowledge Him is instantly to express Him, to see His all fulfilling our desire this instant. But He who is infinite, infinitely unfolds, so the present conviction of good can only rise higher and higher: “This beautiful presence all around us is the substance of every good which we could possibly desire, yea, infinitely more than we are capable of desiring. ‘Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, the things that God hath prepared for them that love Him.’ (Mrs. Eddy, Whoso 17).
Was it a personal or scientific fact, when Jesus saw God as: “Son, all that I have is thine.”? It was personal as individual, and so scientific because the law of being. How can God as cause be without His effect or idea? How can consciousness be without that of which it is conscious? You certainly are not God, cause, so you must be idea, conscious being, the Father’s son. God must give His all to you, His son, for Cause must be as effect, and can only be this way. Turn to God as All and see the real and wondrous fulfilling of your every desire. Let me close this chapter in S & H. with these references 57:18-21, 31-32; 60:29-2; 63:23-27, 65:1-6; 67:27-29; 69:2-5, 13-16.
When a negative statement of things comes to us, it is just as much the presence of God as the straight positive, only it is His presence in reverse appearing, and our desire is fulfilled in direct proportion as we reverse the negative sense. That is, only thus do we see our desire truly and now fulfilled. This is the mystery of evil that has puzzled all the ages, until discovered in Christian Science. This is still the mystery puzzling believers in Christian Science. But it is no longer a puzzle when you put it to work and prove it, Chapter 6 in CCT thoroughly analyzes Mrs. Eddy’s presentation of this most subtle fact in Christian Science.
A little while back, you asked me about Brynes and Marshall, referring to Byrnes’ book, and also to the reporters’ criticism of Marshall at UN. We got the Byrnes’ book, though I haven’t had time to read it. It was a fine thing it came out, for Byrnes gives of real experience, and America is now at school on Russia and the World conditions in which it must move. The criticism of both the book, and of Marhsall by the reporter, to me, was as is so often, much beside the mark. Byrnes real point I feel was clarification, not a policy of you get out of Europe or else. Reporters are too close to daily emotions and impressions, and too short of the real and larger movement as God is moving, to give much of an analysis.
Byrnes did a great job in helping to define Russia as a negative statement, and so clarify our emerging position. His patience, and long developed capacity to get at the other’s view, seems to me just the quality then needed; and the book just means no time was wasted in giving the essence of it for public use. As we came closer to the more clearly appearing division, our strongest military symbol, Marshall, and one who knows world power, is brought in. He carries both more confidence for friend and stamp of authority for foe, at this period. The task both times had been not to outdo Russia at her own game and method, but to move ever more steadily to our own world achieving.
Christian Science puts government and the world “drama of nations” in a wholly new, vital light in understanding. God is governing now. He is now the sole governor. He is All, so is using all, Russia just as much as America. That deduction is the only possible one from the premise of God as All-in-all. He uses and is is all there is to each individual’s action in precisely the same way. In short, God governs all, and is the sole action, whether it appears or is interpreted positively or negatively. Since God is, He is the one positive being or action, if this appears (is interpreted) negatively, the truth is the reverse of the
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appearing, and so to be understood and proved.
Look at the enormous help Russia has been to us as the negative definition of America’s problem in leading the world. Where would we have been without this negative moving of God? Of course, we would have been sunk had we not known and held to, in the large, the reverse is true. But America knows that; that is why God is positively using America in leading the world. Every time an important new move is at hand America must take to be right, up comes Russia with the negative statement, literally pushing us the right way. The Alsop brother last year had a whole article on this in the Sat. Eve. Post. You see this with Russia, and in all directions, if you watch carefully. Right now, when the relief vote is up with Congress, God moves negatively, in what is appearing as these communistic strikes in France and Italy. It practically guarantees Congress will move rightly. Endless examples can be given. On this see the enclosed Times’ editorial of the other day, on the unintended but very real service Vishinsky, in his idiotic, negative diatribes against America, has rendered to America.
The one reason why that is so and can be, is because God is governing all, and is the All and only action. This is the law, sensed by Shakespeare in his “Sweet are the uses of adversity,” and other similar aphorisms. That evil is not an entity or reality, but God, good, negatively appearing, hence His truth and good right there as the sole reality and idiom there to be found in reverse understanding, is the mystery of evil through the ages, for the first time and now solved in Christian Science. The rightly placed beliefs of Christianity, of my own preaching and God-acknowledging grandfather, Barney Johnston, that God is almighty, the ruler of the universe, is carried from that somewhat blind belief, to sheer understanding, and the scientific postulate for realization and demonstration. The belief and the hope, based on the highest in our Christian history is thus opened and raised to scientific conviction.
In SCIENCE AND HEALTH, in the chapter especially for primary teaching, Mrs. Eddied asks: “Is material sense (which is the negative unreversed appearing-J) a necessary preliminary to the understanding and expression of Spirit?” The reply in part is: “If error is necessary to define or to reveal Truth, the answer is yes; but not otherwise.” (485). CCT explains this: “The foregoing means that whenever the negation will best enforce the recognition of the presence of Truth, it will appear, claiming to be the reality (think of Russia in this as a perfect example J.), for frequently the mortal understands the truth of being better when the negative form appears to him than when the positive form appears, because it arouses him to the necessity of reversing it.” (129-130). Thus the quicker we are in His reversal, in His “Agree with thine adversary quickly” (Matt. 5:25) the more quickly is ours, the “but not otherwise.”
This is exactly what God, appearing to America as the Russia negation, has been to America, the arousing of America in the very necessity of reversing this appearing, and so finding it that reverse reading, God as the reality right there, and doing the moving. Now this All-in-all truth must be just as true in your wife and companionship problem. God has moved negatively with you. The reverse of this appearing is true. So start with God, stay with Him at each point, and you will see all harmony is your now, now in the kingdom of heaven, not going there.
Joseph E. Johnston
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New York
5 Dec. ’47-Fri
Dear–:
Yours of the 1st in this A.M. is your typical splendid letter, always better and never worse; yet not to be improved on. If you can figure that out. What is reported from Corey’s class on his teaching is just as he acts, and writes in his book. How God keeps sin at the point of sin as nothing, is one of His wonders! He never knows it and He never permits it to know. “Ignorance, fear and sin.”
Two of Mrs. Eddy’s great treatments of this subject, of course are No. 30-33, and Mess. ’01:12-17. A man awaiting sentence for pilfering some accounts has called on me for some chats; he has long had S&H. and CCT., but has not used them. I got down to sin with him in Mrs. Eddy’s works, epitomized in this I read him: Mess. ‘01.13:22-25. This chap has had a belief in the cleverness of personality, especially his own, in handling people. How wonderfully stated for direction, this that is attributed as Mrs. Eddy’s: “Oh, that personality and materiality were made the point of attack by all who desire to be Christian Scientists.”
A man with a claim, came back recently with his one and old line of how a certain person and people are attacking him, destroying his business, how these thoughts come to him and handle him, he thinks, says he knows where they’re from, and he can’t handle it. I told him to rejoice in its coming, just as Jacob did, and do just as Jacob did with his angel visitant, translate and decode it, for its true meaning, presence and blessing. He always says, I don’t know how. I told him he was just plain lazy; a ten year old can see what reversing a statement is, and go to work to do it. He hedges, I don’t know how to begin. I said you begin with God as consciousness, and so the one consciousness and the one cause of your conscious awareness or being, and then see what God, consciousness is visiting you with, bringing to you as your substance and joy. He says, does consciousness bring me these messages? I said well, what on the face of the whole earth else possibly could. He said, then what do you do. In your case, said I, you better right off see God is person, and absolutely get rid of all persons. Decode that hidden garble claiming to be a person or persons. That is just the code, not the message or this intelligence.
In particular-turn to CCT. p. 292, No person. I said, start right there and put that to work. I said call me back when you have done that work. How wonderfully Mrs. Eddy again states it, Mess.’01. 12:27-2: “Evil is neither quality nor quantity; it is not intelligence, a person or a principle, a man or a woman, a place or a thing, and God never made it.” How splendidly in the …. matter you agree quickly, “I am not interested in their affairs only in their progress heavenward.” Mrs. Eddy says: “The consciousness of light is like the eternal law of God, revealing Him and nothing else.” (No. 30:22-23).
Mrs. Eddy drives this great light to practice home, by coming to it with these words: “God pities our woes with the love of a Father for his child,-not by becoming human, and knowing sin, or naught, but by removing our knowledge of what is not. He could not destroy our woes totally if He possessed any knowledge of them. His sympathy is divine, not human. It is Truth’s knowledge of its own infinitude which forbids the genuine existence of even a claim to error. This knowledge is light wherein there is no darkness,-not light holding
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darkness within itself.” It is scientific certainty that….could not have appeared with this activity as negatively stated in his book, etc., were not God moving in this very language as His perfect way, for the fulfillment of CCT., and “cct”. The most comparable period in the founding, is that Chicago one 1886-89, where the negation was of the teaching, the “cct”. Woodbury toward the end of the century, and then Stetson, presented so far as I now see also teaching negation, but likely also I think a special phase I will have to see more clearly. 1899-’01 Mrs. Eddy was closing the 19th century mothering in the founding, to bring forth the eternal pattern, expressed in part also as the 20th Century Manual. Woodbury must have negatively furthered this great founding step. Her very claim of spiritual child and motherhood in matter suggests such negation. We could never have “cct” to-day, had not Mrs. Eddy concluded the mothering for the Leader, impersonally in the word, and impersonally to be fulfilled in the field’s own impersonal language of understanding which it is.
Stetson, it seems to me, was a negative statement of the full impersonality of “cct”. As Mrs. Eddy was withdrawing, completing all details required for perfection, Stetson was trying to involve the movement in direct, murderous, aggressive malpractice, it was claimed; and also to involve the church in some sort of successor to Mrs. Eddy personally, materially. Her composite letter to Mrs. Eddy showed the intensity of C.S. practice claiming to be personality and personal leadership, the very negation of the forward move Mrs. Eddy was taking, for the impersonal freeing of the “cct” of Christian Science. At once in 1909 it forced the directors to call you. Likely that was just what was necessary as the negative language, absolutely to assure the emerging of your full forward position three years later, in 1912. You recall both those negations of Mrs. Eddy’s founding, appearing as channeled by Woodbury and Stetson, were a good ten years in the making and moving. They were not just sudden fly-by-notes of reversal. Both showed a deep-time moving. Which here just reminds me, Corey says he went through class with Bicknell Young in 1936. (300).
You have a pet word, unraveled”. I say pet, because apparently Mrs. Eddy does not use it, yet it is excellent as you do, and here. EAK’s two leading students, apparently, to the public, apart from Eustace, are Dickey and Young. Dickey’s state of misstatement of “cct was permanently unravelled and recorded in the Trial, and in his going to it and going away from it, especially in his going away from it; those Journal and Sentinel articles, and the whole circumstance of the getting out of the “Memoirs”, and what he said in them. Do you know what was the argument of his death? With the Trial finished, and his promise to Mrs. Eddy kept, doubtless his work had to stand not mussed up further.
Now this whole “cct” has got to be absolutely and absolutely established, in the infinity of all its clarity and tangible spirituality and Mind-beauty. Maybe …. Judas’ task is helping in the full unravelling of all blurring of the infinite perfection of Mrs. Eddy’s glorious founding as “cct”. There cannot be and must not be any confusion anywhere in the whole history, purity, channels, and unfolding of what “cct” really is. Dickey relates especially to negation of the institution, and who else but Young could serve as negation of the teaching proper. For whatever interest, …. comes out of the same geographical spot, and goes to the same fulfilling spot. He operates as teaching, claims it the real teaching, and lays it as student, and
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in detail, to the door of Young. It all looks to me like the full unravelling work. What I like about the word “unravelling”, is that it seems better to apply to a larger span than the word “uncovering. It is like the line of light, or if you will, L of L, straightening out and clarifying the long, confused material sense in history.
In Corey’s book, he goes on from one point to the next, inevitable with his opening premise with Mrs. Eddy, pages 9-13, that she constantly goes from the absolute to the relative. The book never quite does this but it tries it. With that premise, it never quite gets on the absolute to fall off of.
A woman searching for the true answer in Science beyond the ecclesiastical materiality…called on one of the Directors in Boston. He assured her the system all was just as Mrs. Eddy intended. But he only showed her more to the contrary. In brief notes of her interview, he makes three points, all contrary to facts as I quickly pointed out. Of the ’79 Church, “the actual power was in the members’ hands. Mrs. Eddy could suggest or recommend but she had no vote. Malcontents mentioned.” Of course she had a vote legally as much as any member, which she was, and organizer too. But that isn’t the point of the Director’s non-sense. He is trying to show the ’79 Church was material because Mrs. Eddy did not have control, but in the Sept. 23rd reorganization she did, so that organization in contrast to the first, for the reason given above, was spiritual. He is just echoing the same misrepresentation Dickey made in his two articles in ’22 and ’23.
Mrs. Eddy’s control is, of course, not the issue at all in either the ’79 or the ’92 reorganization, as to the material concession and the dissolving into spiritual organization or formation, as Mrs. Eddy has defined it in the founding. The fact there is, she fully controlled both churches. As examples, I pointed out to her, re the ’79 Church how contrary to the facts is the Director’s contention. In Oct. ’80 who controlled in the uprising of eight led by the Jew Arens? Mrs. Eddy completely. In ’88 when she was in Chicago making the Science and the Senses speech etc., and 40% of her own Association, from which the following Sept. she resigned as President and member incidentally, seized the books and bank accounts, to throw Mrs. Eddy out, who in the end got thrown out? Nov. 28, ’89 when Mrs. Eddy requested this Church to dissolve its material concession to the human pattern of organization, who was obeyed? In fact at no point in the ten years from formation on the human pattern of organization of the ’79 Church, to its dissolution into the spiritual bond only, in every issue that arose did Mrs. Eddy fail to have or lose control. The Director’s statement and idea is pure imagination contrary to fact. Indeed there were malcontents and backsliders aplenty as Mrs. Eddy states, but that was as she also states just their incapacity to how to the understanding and line, unless she handled the malpractice for them. As Mrs. Eddy says, in ’86 and on, as she had to turn from Boston to the world founding, and could not keep them straight, they just wobbled more.
Now on the vote point, the fact is, Mrs. Eddy had a vote in ’79 officially, but had no official vote in the ’92 Sept. 23rd. reorganization. That was in the material concession again, which was the human pattern of membership with its elected officials. Mrs. Eddy controlled the ’79 Church because of her spiritual power and authority, not even of course because she in fact did have a legal vote. In the
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reorganization, Mrs. Eddy as you know put the “vote” in the hands of the First Members, and from the first to her goodbye, made her own relationship with this Church a wholly voluntary one, not even involving “human” membership, but resting solely on this Church’s acceptance of her as spiritual Leader. The title was first Mother, until Mrs. Eddy knew the mothering work was in fact concluded in 1903 in substance, dispensed with Mother for Leader, and in the last seven years, made it wholly Leader in the word only.
Of course Mrs. Eddy in March ’95 took the nominal position of Pastor Emeritus. This in itself is a voluntary status, an authority simply of voluntary association in deepest respect and desire to avail of the revered intelligence and wisdom of the long established senior leader. The Manual had nothing to do with Mrs. Eddy’s vote, but did make orderly the Church First Members’ voting under her control.
The Director again tries to distort this Mother Church voting to sanctify the directors’ superior spirituality. Apparently this was from his book on his parents: “After voting in a certain question, Mrs. Eddy requested the First Members to write her their reasons for so voting, and on receiving their replies, dissolved them too, leaving all power in the hands of the Directors subject to her emphatic supervision in the By-laws.” (p. 140). Whatever else is said here in his book, this clearly seems an inference that at this point, Mrs. Eddy saw the directors were spiritually superior to the First Members, so Mrs. Eddy gave them the power they now claim they have, and of course this would be more evidence that Mrs. Eddy so intended. The Directors’ twist here, and all the twists to give these directors ecclesiastical control, will of course vanish into the thin air it is, when all the Directors obey “subject to her emphatic supervision as outlined in the By-laws.”
I am going into this Director here, not because he said this, and only a couple of week sago, but because his points are also excellent negations for bringing out the facts of the area he misstates.
Here is his next one: “After the dissolution ((Dec.’89) church services were continued. Officers remained at their posts, and great unity, growth and healing followed. This very condition seemed to force the next step, a place where to meet.” You understand of course, these are just the merest outline of salient points he used an hour to establish, all adding up to, the directors supremacy, the present system etc., is just as Mrs. Eddy meant it and provided. Above all with them, I think they stress, in the effort to get around estoppels and contradictions to the Science, what Mrs. Eddy says they intended. You recall in the Trial how Krauthoff, Smith etc. then stressed that. What Mrs. Eddy intended! They had to, for the deed in particular and other things galore, including the Manual, were constant stumbling blocks.
First, on the above, this Director shows he has no idea of what the record makes absolutely clear, was occurring in this dissolving. If he did, for one thing, he never could deduce that the spiritual prosperity of that spiritual bond step, in itself, forced again to return to the specific concession of a human membership with its elected membership with its elected officials. There was no return to the concession of the “church” owning church property. Seeing none of this
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glorious achieving, he comes up with the silly idea that the reorganization step was forced, in order to build an edifice to house the spiritual prosperity achieved in the material dissolving before the reorganization, that he now also asserts is the “spiritually organized church” because Mrs. Eddy now controls it as contrasted with the one she did not control before the material dissolving in Dec. ’89. If that idea seems a bit complex and stupid, you can only say it is.
He winds up by attributing no virtue at all to the period that contributed what he describes as “great unity, growth and healing”. Of course they have to say that because Mrs. Eddy in Ret. puts it in plain type. But when you’re not looking closely, they try to slip this over to the reorganized state. In the cold fact, Mrs. Eddy arranged the edifice building in the ’92 Deed. The reorganized church membership concession may have, and I believe did help to bring in the money and build the edifice. Assure or grant it was also necessary for this purpose. But all the essential activities of the Mother Church, the ones the directors are forbidden to carry on, and the same ones they insist in carrying on, in order to control Christian Scientists throughout the world, started in 1898 long after the edifice was completed, and every phase of this activity, the lectures, the degrees, and the publicity supervision, related solely to the field, and to establishing world-wide acceptance and individual practice of Christian Science. So far as edifice went, the Extension was built by the field, the churches, in contrast to the M.C. edifice proper, being built primarily by her own students. Even how it appeared to Mrs. Eddy as to why she at the time moved the reorganization is not too important. She knew what to do and how to do, often doubtless that God would do the watering, reveal the fullness. The history of the reorganized Mother Church was to mother the churches to full world founding, and was started in 1903 into dissolution materially, as that task came to its accomplishment.
His last misrepresentation in of the pattern of the others, all growing out of a misconception of the really simple and unified thing Mrs. Eddy was doing, in the ’89 material dissolving, and the reorganization in partial concession in ’92: “Mrs. Eddy always distrustful of organization (which none of the Directors seem able to duplicate J.) resisted and held out but at length gave way (shades of Hugh Kennedy J.) and asked 12 Scientists to meet a fortnight hence. During this fortnight a Mass. law was discovered and at the meeting, instead of forming the church, four directors were appointed to function under a Deed of Trust which her lawyer had drawn up. (End of Manual). These four began to function at once by opening funds for the bldg., etc. Three weeks later Mrs. Eddy went back on her conviction, wrote to the 12 Scientists, and asked them to vote themselves into membership. This was the point that decided the litigation in favor of the directors.”
These 1892 letters, I think cover Mrs. Eddy specifically on this 12 maneuvering he (director) refers to. I will exactly recheck them. But the facts are simple and absolutely clear, except to the Directors. All that Summer as you know, Mrs. Eddy was battling, and I mean battling, to hold off her misguided followers, led by Nixon of her own property trustees, not to reorganize the church again owning property. For the vital reason she would not then herself have power to dissolve it. A property owning corp. has to get rid of its property in order to dissolve. Mrs. Eddy fought it through until she located
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that Mass. law, then got the property she had from ’89 held for the church into the hands of the now public charitable trustees of The First Church; and then was free to reorganize the church proper, for her world task for the churches and individual practice.
What “conviction” did Mrs. Eddy go back on? None at all. On the contrary she had with absolute tenacity all through ’92 held to what God was directing in the reorganization she had prophesied the previous Nov. None of them could jolt her out of what she knew. They especially tried it right to the last on the pub. house mixing, which involved both the church dissolving problem and also the vital one of freedom between the two boards and no ecclesiastical final control. Mrs. Eddy’s earlier efforts in those few weeks, to hold off these followers, was the same one all through ’92, to keep the threefold separation: the church property, the church property, and the publishing work. From the standpoint of the Mother Church, to assure its material dissolution, involving as was to be seen and now, a Boston lecture board, Boston degrees, and Boston approved practitioners, above all, Boston control of local Christian Science publicity.
You can see it is a real help to this woman to have these points thrown at her, before she comes face to face with the actual facts, as recorded in the Journals etc. Note the point that this belief that some higher teaching by Mrs. Eddy is not in her published works, and is awaiting those ready to use and see it, is pernicious suggestion. ….as you know, seems to think that is one value of his work and why he puts it out the way he does. Corey’s book p. 294-295 claims it, but what the world really has to understand is “cct” and the negation, and the real institutional founding. The value in these things is not at all the way they think, and I am making this clear to this woman.
(signed) Joseph E. Johnston
(This is not a direct copy, changes having been made to leave to references to person.–JEJ)
* * * * * * * * * *
Dec. 14, 1947-Sun.
(finished Dec. 21)
Dear….:
While to-day and your visit is fresh in mind, there may be a few points you will find helpful to have written down. It has been nearly two years likely since I looked at the original in the Dec. ’89 Journal, of the resolutions of the M.M.C., dissolving its material organization for instruction in Christian Science into the “spiritual formation” for the “teaching (that is) a purely spiritual and scientific impartation of Truth, whose Christly spirit has led to higher ways, means, and understanding.” (Ret.48).
I am grateful you spotted the two resolutions of the original omitted from Ret. As my remark to you showed, I had settled into a conviction Ret. was the exact copy (48-49), except its short introduction as to why the dissolving,–” that we are living in the spiritual world, not in one that is material.” I can see why Mrs. Eddy removed these two resolutions, if not in Ret’s earlier editions, at least when she again was led to conduct through her auxiliary college, some more controlled teaching,–1898 to 1910, but its real essence under Edward A. Kimball from the opening to July 1903, when she forbid for three years, any Normal classes and so “Boston” officially designated degrees. Mrs. Eddy had EAK resign in June 1904, as she expressed it, “crowned with honors-his Teacher and Leader loving him…and the race benefited by his labors.” In the same statement of Mrs. Eddy’s (Jr. v.22, No. 3, p. 184), is also given this most significant statement for the churches for teaching and all their activity, “The Magna Charta of Christian Science means…the inalienable, universal rights of men…wherein and whereby man governed by his Creator is self-governed…equal rights and privileges.” (My. 254).
These two omitted resolutions in no way affect the perfect statement now in Ret. on material organization as the negation of spiritual formation, “the fundamental principle for growth in Christian Science,” and that “mortals must learn to lose their estimate of the powers that are not ordained of God, and attain the bliss of loving unselfishly, working patiently, and conquering all that is unlike Christ.” But these other statements of Mrs. Eddy do drive them home, as well as specially instruct on teaching, and trenchantly show again why she dissolved, with all the rest of her Mother Church, the “Boston designated” degrees, a human designation of God’s power:
“Res., That an Institution for instruction in Christian Science, which is the highest, purest, and noblest of all teaching, should be of a spiritual formation wholly outside of material regulations, forms, or customs.”
“Res., That we find no platform in Christ’s teaching for such material methods of instruction in Christian Science, and we must come into the meekness of his methods as we rise in Christian experience.” (Journal v.7, p. 455, Dec. 1889).
This gives an interesting illustration of what is the fact thus far to me, that Mrs. Eddy has left in her works, contrary to Corey’s statement 294-95 and others’ beliefs, all essential in substance, for
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she says this in Mis. p. 274, in the article, Close of the Mass. Metaphysical College: “From the scant history of Jesus and of his disciples, we have no Biblical authority for a public institution. This point, however, had not impressed me when I opened my College.” How your more recent experience in “relearning” Christian Science illustrates these above two resolutions! Mr. Eustace, of course, had his “most joyous and enlightening” experience in 1902 in attending Edward A. Kimball’s class, and has his Boston degree, (CCT xviii). But not even his holding of Mrs. Eddy’s degree, or any other factor in material regulations or material methods of teaching instruction, brought you your recognition and understanding of “the clear, correct teaching of Christian Science.”
You found your each step as you first turned from “material methods of instruction in Christian Science,” to instruction found in spiritual formation, in “voluntary association under God.” (A LETTER, p. 6). Material organization engenders acceptance of belief and misstatement. One’s own conscious knowing carries conviction, and in sincerity and honest looking to God, can never fail. This is certain graduation “with divine honors,” just as Mrs. Eddy founded and defined it with Mr. Kimball in the 1904 Journal. In this article on closing the College, Mrs. Eddy gives one of her most universal definitions of what spiritual formation instead of material organization, will accomplish “for growth in Christian Science”: “God bless my enemies, as well as the better part of mankind, and gather all my students, in the bonds of love and perfectness, into one grand family of Christ’s followers.” (Mis. 273).
Positively we may be assured-and Mrs. Eddy here for Christian Scientists certainly gives us a wonderful statement for “purely spiritual and scientific impartation of Truth”-that “material regulations, forms, or customs” and “material methods of instruction” will never accomplish this universal and grand goal. This same page, 273, also has a most enlightening statement apropos this recent class of Corey’s I mentioned I heard of, of 163: “There are one hundred and sixty applications lying on the desk before me, for the Primary class in the Mass. Meta. College, and I cannot do my best work for a class which contains that number.” Hearing of this attempt to outdo our Leader, I looked into the Chap. on teaching in S. & H.
There has been no question in my mind, since I saw Corey’s ad introducing his book as the first class book on Christian Science made public, and positively so after reading the book, that it is fulfilling the inevitable negative appearing or postulate of error. (Mis. 57). As “clear, correct teaching” has begun positively to move the past few years, in word as teaching and institution, its negation of what it is not has to appear, for the full and infinite statement of what it is. Corey’s position now on teaching does that, and Doorly’s the same on “the clear, correct teaching of C.S.” on its institution. Doorly taking your way in the spiritual bond or formation will win, but never in offsetting his misconception of church or spiritual formation in Christian Science with his own brand of “clear, correct teaching”, and his own material organization. All there is to both is God more fully defining His new breeze in the gathering momentum of genuine Christian Science. Is not the twentieth century with Christian Scientists behind schedule?
Now the very opening paragraph in S. & H. on teaching starts with the medical-anatomy question, and reverses the negation there can be any mixing of mind and matter in teaching and treatment. After four positives on pages 444-45, the second negation reversed is the “Blight of avarice.” “There is great danger in teaching Mind-healing indiscriminately…for the petty consideration of money, teaching his slight knowledge of-
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Mind-power.” Thus the very two negations said so to characterize this Corey class, of a size Mrs. Eddy refused, are the first two negations in teaching that S. & H. reverses. That certainly is wasting not an instant in more fully defining what “clear, correct teaching of Christian Science” is.
It is also most interesting, in contemplating what Mrs. Eddy defined, in materially dissolving her teaching bond, as the “purely spiritual and scientific impartations of Truth,” the immediate headings that follow this reversal of the vicious sin of money greed: Exclusion of malpractice, Iniquity overcome, No trespassing on human rights, Expose sin without believing in it, Wicked evasions, and Truth’s grand results: “….impossible for error, evil, and hate to accomplish the grand results of Truth and Love. The reception or pursuit of instructions opposite to absolute Christian Science must always hinder scientific demonstration.” (448).
You said today that you were thinking about this postulate of error that Mrs. Eddy says, as the truth of man is demonstrated must appear. (Mis. 57). The word is from the Latin, to demand; so, what is demanded to appear. CCT. 308 puts it most simply: “The ‘postulates’ (S&H 288) of C. S. are the self-evident truths of Christian Science.” They are the what is not of what is, thus fully defining what is. Just as you are finding, ecclesiasticism or material organization is not C.S., more fully, in fact fully correctly, defining what C.S. is.
Mrs. Eddy perfectly illustrates this in giving the chief postulates in C.S: “That Life is God, good, and not evil; that Soul is sinless, not to be found in the body; that Spirit is not, and cannot be, materialized; that Life is not subject to death; that the real spiritual man has no birth, no material life, and no death.” Each conviction of what is, self-evidently carried with it the conviction of what is not, just as Mrs. Eddy here shows in these chief postulates of C.S. This must appear, for the full infinity and realization of what is. Do we not see this straight through almost every line of what Mrs. Eddy has established as the word that is C.S.? To declare the positive, without its full statement brought out in what it is not, is to measure less than the infinite, and prove we do not understand “the clear, correct teaching of Christian Science,” because we then leave the inevitable and certain “postulate of error”, God’s negative statement, out of His allness, and so evil as entity, as person, place, and thing apart from Mind.
Remembering that the negative to belief comes as hatred, malice, the anti-Love of personal sense and personality, how more wonderously could Mrs. Eddy have stated this whole paragraph, in particular its opening sentence: “Dispensing the Word charitably, but separating the tares from the wheat, let us declare the positive and negative of metaphysical Science: what it is and what it is not.” (Mis. 172). That whole paragraph is one of the marvels Mrs. Eddy penned, in English as often with her, absolutely unmatchable, but yet its meaning still more. Note the very next statement there: “Divine and unerring Mind measures man, until the three measures be accomplished, and he arrives in the fullness of stature.” The divine and unerring Mind measures the fullness, the what is and what is not, and His negation is hid in the three measures of meal until His all is positively realized, the giving of all things back to Him until His monopoly in utter reliance is the conscious fact. (Un. 10:8-10).
In building our “structure of Truth and Love”, the working basis
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of our understanding practice (CCT.308), one of the deepest points to me, to see, was why the isness that is God or consciousness, carries with it its suppositional opposite or contrary implication. In short, carries its postulate of error. This statement is CCT 122 I find at the heart of it: “Every truth by virtue of its own isness, hence allness, carries within itself the contradiction of the lie about itself.” This the mystery of evil, of course, that has puzzled and frustrated the philosophers and religions of all the centuries, until the discovery of C.S. It is the mystery to Christian Scientists that plagued Mrs. Eddy from Richard Kennedy right on, with the exception of Kimball, in large measure, and what she finds as the mental state of the San Jose church in 1905, to the very necessity for her passing in 1910. Because of the mental assassination that this ignorance is to the understanding of the “clear, correct teaching of C.S.”
It is also interesting to note that this same vital point became a repetition and elaboration in Whoso, in explaining the chapter, How Malicious Mental Malpractice Seems to Come into Being: “by virtue of the law that every truth includes, within itself, by implication, the concept of its own opposite. This is the law of opposites: To illustrate this point, is it not obvious that is, being is, because its ‘seed is in itself’ alone determines itself, and so implies that anything outside itself, outside that which is must necessarily be is not.” (56). If this were not so, what would not the lie, as it were, get away with? There is nothing like direct experience to put conviction at the point of Truth and reality. Can we find a better illustration of this working basis in C.S., than its postulate as ecclesiasticism? The is of Christian Science, of C.S. government, of C.S. movement, has been using nearly forty years in the unfolding and absolute founding of the self-evident postulate of C.S., that ecclesiasticism is not the Science, the government, the movement. All these are ‘the self-evident truths of Christian Science.” (CCT 308), and so this contradiction God carries within Himself, of the implication or contradiction of Himself as Christian Science, is all these years with His postulate of error, gloriously unfolding what He is as Christian Science, its “clear, correct teaching.” For this reason C.S. did not perish with Mrs. Eddy. What should be our gratitude for this “inner resource” of His infinity?
The final turning point in your experience, as you explained, strange as it first would seem appearing as your best physical healing, lies at this very point of this revelation of C.S. Your finest healing carried to you the conviction that that mental practice is not C.S. Why? How could it? Because you had accepted the isness, the allness of Mind, so you had with you, and could not fail as C.S., to have with you, the contradiction of the lie about itself, and any implication contrary to its Truth. Honestly and sincerely accepting Mind is all, God was infinite blessing you in the realization that there is no mental state apart from Him that is C.S. and its practice. The C’s [Carpenters] give you a searching statement attributed to Mrs. Eddy from P.V.; “Mesmerism and hypnotism may heal sickness; but neither mesmerism nor hypnotism can heal sin. The test of a Christian Scientist is whether we can heal sin.” We certainly can if we understand, and if we can’t we do not see the postulate of error must appear, giving the full declaration of what is in His what is not. You saw just that and it freed and turned you. Who knows better than you the glorious freedom God thus gave you: Because He carries within His infinity by the reverse of any implication of or contrary lie. Thus we know God is All-power in every treatment, and Christian Science never can lose a case. For He is all there is to both the positive and the negative.
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Here is that introduction in the Journal, Dec. 1889, which then and first published these dissolving resolutions or definition, of the material organization of her College and teaching, into the “spiritual formation” without “material means and methods” she herewith defines. Its “we are living in (Orig. underlining J.) the spiritual world” now, is indeed, as it is for this purpose here given, the basic reason in C. S., that all human organization in the practice of C.S. must be dissolved or resolved into spiritual organization, spiritual formation, spiritual bond, spiritual reality, even as all now is: “The preamble and resolutions published herewith explains so fully as to preclude comment, the latest of the steps by which we are being led to the fuller consciousness that ‘man is, not will be spiritual’-that we are living in the spiritual world, not in one that is material.” (Jr. vol. 7, Dec. 1889, p. 454).
This same Dec. ’89 Journal also has the article, The Way, now in Mis. 355-59. This Journal appears at the moment Mrs. Eddy also (Dec. 2nd) is dissolving the material organization into “spiritual latitudes where the law of love is the only bond of union,” “that they will continue as a Voluntary Association of Christians knowing no law but the law of Love, and no Master but Christ in the exercise of all the ministrations and activities heretofore performed by them as a Church of Christ, Scientist”, and “this action is taken in order to realize more perfectly the purpose of its institution as an organization, viz, growth in spiritual life.” (Powell-M.B.E.309). Mrs. Eddy, of course, and obviously, wrote all these material dissolving resolutions or directly inspired their form, because of their deep spiritual import in her actual founding of organization in Christian Science as wholly spiritual.
In The Way, Mrs. Eddy gives one of her finest statements, and directly, for the translation, and for the necessity for this ever-translating practice in Christian Science, of the material sense or Mind-misstatement of organization into the real and only bond, the spiritual bond, the real Christian compact, the spiritually organized, the spiritual formation, that is Christian Science: “Voluntary association under God is the only bond Love knows. That bond is the divine unity that brings forth the fruits of Love and insures genuine brotherly love.” (A LETTER). Mrs. Eddy gives the ever three steps, mentally, in the work of the Christian Scientist. (355-57) Then Mrs. Eddy gives the substance-goal of this material dissolving or translating: “Less teaching and good healing is to-day the acme of ‘well done’; a healing that is not guesswork,–chronic recovery ebbing and flowing,–but instantaneous cure. This absolute demonstration of Science must be revived….The student who heals by teaching and teaches by healing, will graduate with divine honors, which are the only appropriate seals for Christian Science.” (355, 358).
Mrs. Eddy then confirms that the field then, in 1889, or doubtless whenever the concession to the human pattern of organization is interpreted as necessary, could continue with this concession, just as she used it in Aug. 1879 for her first church step, but with her translation in fact now to show the way, Mrs. Eddy here in strict line with her thousand-fold statements, from 1870 Science of Man to her 1909 The Way of Wisdom, and her 1910 instruction in “Mrs. Eddy’s Reply”, My 242,–Mrs. Eddy here in affirming this temporary concession, promptly points the way in C.S. “organization”, and issues her mandatory invitation: “When students have fulfilled all the good ends of organization, (must not that mean, or include, when the negation has shown its full abject nature, just as Mrs. Eddy recounts of her ’79 Church in her Nov. 28th, ’89 letter asking it to dissolve, and as you saw in the face of your finest “physical healing” positively not what Christian Science is-J.) and are convinced that by leaving the material forms thereof a higher spiritual unity is won, then
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is the time to follow the Alma Mater. Material organization is requisite only in the beginning; but when it has done its work, (God’s positive and negative-J.) the purely Christly method of teaching and preaching must be adopted.”
That none would misunderstand, that these material dissolving resolutions for the “spiritual fact of whatever the material senses behold” (S&H 585) applied to church quite as much as to school, in the Feb. 1890 Journal, p. 566, under the heading “The Boston Church of Christ (Scientist), is this statement: “The dissolution of the visible organization of the Church is the sequence and complement of that of the College Corporation and Association. The College disappeared, ‘that the spirit of Christ might have freer course among its students and all who come into the understanding of divine Science’; the bonds of organization of the Church were thrown away, so that its members might assemble themselves together and “provoke one another to good works” in the bond only of Love.
“All that is needed in explanation of the above named changes is found in the concluding paragraphs of the article, “The Way” written by the Teacher (Journal for Dec.): “When students have fulfilled all the good ends of organization, and are convinced that by leaving the material forms thereof a higher spiritual unity is won, then is the time to follow the Alma Mater.'” Thus whether in organization, it is College or Church, her Association or the field National Association, or Mrs. Eddy’s own “humanly” designated place or position, the concession to the human pattern or organization, with humanly recorded members, and its “official” positions or placing, in Christian Science is to be translated into the bond of Spirit, of Love, as the spiritual reality and true organization.
None are excused from this inevitable step, founded and demanded by our Leader. It is not stoppage, cessation, or vacuum. It is going forward in the spiritual bond that is Christian Science practice, instead of dreaming on in the material belief of bond. You recall Mrs. Eddy herself first resigned each material or humanly voted position, thus forcing those in each activity to recognize her as spiritual leader. In each case the record shows this accepting of Mrs. Eddy spiritually instead of materially in her leadership, brought forth far more the work and fruits of divine Love. For your reference, here is Mrs. Eddy’s exact explanation from Mis. 136, ending with her ever-requirement in the founding, “and with the hope that you will follow”:
“When I retired from the field of labor, (departure from Boston for Concord in the fall of 1889 as she was proceeding to the spiritual translation of her several institutions-J.) it was a departure, socially, publicly, and finally, from the routine of such material modes as society and the societies demand. Rumors are rumors,–nothing more. I am still with you in the field of battle, taking forward marches, broader and higher views, and with the hope that you will follow.”
In March, 1892 Journal, opening with tentative drawings of the coming Mother Church edifice, with all Christian Scientists absorbed in this great task, Mrs. Eddy in the same issue spiritually brought them “down to earth,” where heaven must be found as the present reality; “It is not indispensable to organize materially Christ’s church….if this be done, let it be in concession to the period, and not as a perpetual
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or indispensable ceremonial….The real Christian compact is love for one another. This bond is wholly spiritual and inviolate.” (Mis. 91).
In July, 1894, the building of the edifice was in full swing, with Mrs. Eddy giving the heaviest pressure to positively finish the task in 1894. The June issue carries Mrs. Eddy’s Mother Church Corner-stone Address, and states emphatically that “My work for the Mother Church is done.” (original underlining), (p. 94) of course it was, for the edifice was but the tribute to the understanding of Christian Science which she had raised up; and soon with the tools of her Mother Church, her task was to raise up to the world founding, the churches and the genuine individual practice. Yet on the opening page of this July issue, as she publicly thanked Capt. And Mrs. Eastaman for their contribution to build the platform and pulpit, Mrs. Eddy again spiritually “cracked down”. That is, she again used this momentous materially-appearing church activity to translate into spiritual reality:
“The church, more than any other institution, at present is the cement of Society, and it should be the bulwarks of civil and religious liberty. But the time cometh when the religious element, or Church of Christ, shall exist alone in the affections, and need no organization to express it.” (133-134). In Misc. Mrs. Eddy incorporated this front page July ’94 statement into her Corner-stone Mother Church Address. (Mis. 144-145).
The following March, 1895, on the 20th, after every last least detail of the Mother Church was finished, the directors offered it to Mrs. Eddy and asked her to take the pastorate. On the 25th of March, Mrs. Eddy refused the personal material place which she had dissolved for the spiritual bond only, instead accepting the honorary, nominal, spiritual bond of Pastor Emeritus. In fact, after Mrs. Eddy translated her material bond placements in 1888-89, she never again, as on Sept. 23rd., ’92, or March 25, ’95, returned to a material concession bond from her spiritual position. How to accept and to reject the Mother Church, holding it in consciousness as wholly as spiritual and not material, Mrs. Eddy at this outset defines for all Christian Scientists for all time: “You ask too much when asking me to accept your grand church edifice. I have more of earth now, than I desire, and less of heaven; so pardon my refusal of that as a material offering.” (Pul 88-87).
In Aug. 1896 as Mrs. Eddy was approaching her final twelve years, 1898-1910, when she would unloose for world activity for the churches the seemingly material activities of Boston designated lecturers, Boston designated teaching degrees, Boston directed publicity control, Mrs. Eddy wrote to the dedication of a church: “Forget not for a moment, that God is All-in-all-therefore, there is but one Cause and one 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.” (Jour. 318, Mis. 154-55). I see in Misc., Mrs. Eddy revised the end: “therefore, that in reality there is but one cause and effect.” Right now Cause with a capital C may be desirable.
In the March Journal of 1897, with her seemingly material activities to be unloosed but a year away, Mrs. Eddy took a powerful step in temporary dissolving, spiritually to purify beforehand the C.S. movement. She evidently foresaw Christian Scientists must have a sharp spiritual
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purification, to be ready to translate the material seeming, and maintain the spiritual fact, in the face of what would to sense seem to become a great Boston material activity; “The Christian Scientists in the United States and Canada are hereby enjoined not to teach a student Christian Science for one year, commencing Mar. 14, 1897. ‘Miscellaneous Writings’ (just out-J) is calculated to prepare the minds of all true thinkers to understand the C.S. Textbook more correctly than a student can. The Bible, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and my other published works are the only proper instructors for this hour.”
What Mrs. Eddy there enforced on any designated teaching, for her own word as the teacher of Christian Science, in the estoppels on her passing she permanently enjoined on Boston teaching the moment she was no longer there to supervise and control it. Largely I think, that teaching for degree stopped when in July 1903 with Mr. Kimball still in charge from the beginning, the Normal class, and so degrees, were forbidden for three years. How the “clear, correct teaching of Christian Science”, then practically founded, and designated “officially” by Mrs. Eddy in 1908, since has so gloriously unfolded in its ever more impersonal word: Your own experience is fresh, positive evidence of this, and excellent evidence too.
Even when Mrs. Eddy in 1898 reopened her College with its teaching auxiliary under Edward A. Kimball, Mrs. Eddy preserved in part this 1897 year’s teaching requirement-a material dissolution of teaching, advanced to direct oneness with God and her books only-for those who felt they had learned understanding of C.S. using only her books. She permitted, perhaps almost insisted, they go direct to the College for an examination, and if successful, got her auxiliary-signed degree without having had any human primary teacher. The 10th Edition in 1899 carries this requirement, yes, here in the original I see it is mandatory there: “A student of the books of Mary Baker G. Eddy shall not take lessons of another student, but is eligible to examination by the C.S. Board of Education.” (44-45, 10th ed.)
Mrs. Eddy felt deeply and was emphatic on this problem, because of the absolute necessity to learn Christian Science correctly, its “clear, correct teaching”, “that however little be taught or learned, that little shall be right.” (Ret. 61) Here Mrs. Eddy herself in a letter to Judge Clarkson of Omaha, Sept. 24, 1898, explains this rule in the 10th edition: “My dear Friend in Truth: Your letter is opportune. By the way, Church rules are being made regulating the action of the Board of Education. I have drawn up the Rules. One of these entitles a student of my books to present himself to the Board for examination and if he passes it favorably, he is graduated under the auspices of the Mass. Metaphysical College. But this student is not a student of a student. He is a student of C.S. as contained in my works. His certificate contains my signature.
“I have found this order requisite, imperative, owing to certain abuses in teaching C.S. You can excuse yourself to dear Mrs. Ewing on the ground aforesaid. I prefer under the circumstances that a student of my works should graduate thus if I have not taught them in class. Mrs. Ewing is one of my best teachers and she will see the need of the provision for the action of the Board….M.B.Eddy.”
This surely is a forecast, as indeed almost a foretaste, of dissolution of the material form or bond in teaching, (in learning C.S.) for the spiritual formation involuntary association under God. (A.L.) Mrs. Eddy really finished the important Boston designated teaching and degree
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in five years, when in 1903-29th ed.-she abolished Normal or degree classes, then putting E.A.K. in charge of what was a national teachers’ association, the General Teachers’ Association, which had three annual meetings from ’03 to ’05. E.A.K. meanwhile in 1904 had been retired from the College. Even if Mrs. Eddy in these five years, as I think she did, but don’t want to check it now (yes, M.B.E. dropped it 26th Ed. 1902) closed out this direct to the College provision, all by June 1911, in fact the 89th Manual this second Normal class after 1907 in Dec. 1910, for Mrs. Eddy passed on in the first week in Dec. (the 3rd) so no degrees then or further, and no Boston College. (Man. 88, 90, 91)
Mr. Eustace once said to me, he had never known a Christian Scientist who had learned his Science straight from S.&H. who was not straight. Our “cct” now shows us we learn C.S. straight in communion from God, not from the books. But we never rest our conviction until the books verify and confirm our communing, our knowing. Thus no C. Scientist will ever jump “beyond” Mrs. Eddy, nor depart in conscious rejection from a single thing she has founded in her word as Christian Science. Look how your own experience verifies this direct learning. When your deep and innate spiritual sense showed you, you must learn Christian Science all over again and right, you saw and said, You must go straight to God to learn it. C.S. can be found in no other way. Never has been. Look all the way how impersonally the “clear, correct teaching of Christian Science has unfolded. Kimball was always rejected and hated by “Boston”. Your Mrs. Stewart told me Bliss Knapp studied with EAK in the College, but turned on him, and reviled. Most of them did. Mr. Eustace has left us in his L. of L., and CCT especially, his marvelous impersonal story, and the malicious “official” rejection, only helping to unfold straight from God, our now wholly impersonal-available to all now as ink and paper-“clear, correct teaching” of Christian Science. This going straight ot God-it could only have been completed impersonally after Mrs. Eddy had departed, so with no chance to go to her-has given us forever not only the “little that is straight”, but the straight whole teaching. No human organization can thwart it, anymore than tongue and pen can form to overthrow SCIENCE AND HEALTH (110). No sooner has HWE set the impersonal CCT to stand forth as the direct teaching, than the negation starts to move on it, thus providing this great new, impersonal achieving in this long history of the founding the language of understanding the teaching of C.S. This history started at least by 1886, or ’87 when Kimball was picked out of his grave, if not sooner, say when Mrs. Eddy found herself forced to go herself to give the first Chicago teaching in 1884, or starting the Journal in 1883, which was to reach all, or even back to Mrs. Eddy’s first class in 1870, with her first Questions and Answers then pretty well formed, as the language of all others than herself in understanding. The very fact that it then took her five years, with its seven months of final agonizing delay, to set forth the negative as necessary ingredient in the clear, correct teaching” (1st Ed. S. & H.) is sufficient to show anyone they must master evil as negation, as malicious mental malpractice, to understand Christian Science, and so qualify for membership in the spiritual bond of The Mother Church. (Man. 34, 58 and specifically 114, 116, 118). Each of these requires not only acceptance, but UNDERSTANDING.
Here are the dissolvings for your use:
(1) Mrs. Eddy’s “official” positions by vote in the human pattern of recorded membership: 1. Sept. 5, 1888, President and member of her Mass. Meta. College C.S.A. (1876 one now of course embraced in College from 1882 when Mrs. Eddy started her College teaching):
- Feb.-Mar. Journal editor announces Mrs. Eddy no longer any “official”-as humanly accepted-responsibility for the Journal:
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- May 28, ’89 positive and final letter to Boston Church resigning as Pastor:
- June issue of the Journal, June 1st. This Journal announcement gave her resignation as Teacher in her College, and Mrs. Eddy had it thus reach all those attending the N.C.S.A. in Cleveland, before they left their homes.
- June 12, 1889 – resignation as Pres. And member of the National Christian Science Association at its annual meeting in Cleveland, in 1889, at which she also presented them with the ownership and management-“official” and legal responsibility-of the Journal: Thus Mrs. Eddy dissolved or resolved every one of her material or human placements according to the humanly accepted pattern of organization and procedure. But as you now fully understand, Mrs. Eddy was not quitting or stopping, as would be the case if this had been an operation in human mind or belief. Mrs. Eddy thus forced Christian Scientists to recognize and accept her position as wholly spiritual and wholly in the spiritual bond of Love only, what A LETTER with such simplicity and perfection states as: “Voluntary association under God is the only bond Love knows. That bond is the divine unity that brings forth the fruits of Love and ensures brotherly love.”
It is in the order of the “I” is lifted up to draw all men, in the order of the Science, that Mrs. Eddy first moved positively to spiritual bond or spiritual organization in and as Christian Science, before she led her followers in each of her organizations, all used to launch her churches-the Church of Christ, Scientist-to the world, to dissolve the concession of material organization, into the “spiritually organized church” or spiritual formation. But Mrs. Eddy wasted no time. Her last personal material dissolving was June 12th with the N.C.S.A. (2) Mrs. Eddy materially dissolves her four organizations: 1. Sept. 23, 1889-Mrs. Eddy has the MMCSA itself dissolve. For what it is worth, you might note that three years to the day, she reorganized her Mother Church for its task to complete the world founding of the absolutely free church and the absolutely individual practice: 2. Oct. 29, ’89 – Mrs. Eddy dissolved her College. (Ret. 48-49 and Dec. Journal). These full dissolvings in the record now are the fullest single statement, as they should be of the College and teaching, of spiritual organization in Christian Science. But the record in all these material dissolvings-they are partly in the P.R. #30-are of the very same and excellent elaboration and definition: 3. Dec. 2, ’89-the Boston Church materially dissolves, in accord with Mrs. Eddy’s request letter of a few days’ earlier Nov. 28th. (Power-M.B.E. 309 and C’s collection), and of course, and most important in correction of Boston misstatement, Ret. 44-45; 4. May 29, 1890-in obedience to Mrs. Eddy’s letter of May 23rd, (Now. Misc. 137-39) no materially dissolved, precisely as the first three, into what their resolutions designate as “a voluntary Assembly of Christians.” (p. 42 N.C.S.A. Report). Note Mrs. Eddy placed her dissolving request in Misc. right after, p. 136, she explains her own material dissolving for her spiritual placement.
There are eight of these dissolving resolutions, (nine dissolvings included Mrs. E. and the Journal) they are strictly of a part with the others, and define who is called a Christian Scientist, in contrast to the present ecclesiastical definition as one who accepts the supremacy of the directors over all pertaining to Christian Science, its interpretation, its teaching, its churches, and individual practice; then stresses the material dissolving is not disintegration, but forward to real union. Particularly noteworthy is the definition here founded by Mrs. Eddy, of the self-constituting or self-appointing spontaneous wholly spiritual qualification for membership, as membership now in what Mrs. Eddy has left as the universal, spiritual Mother Church, what again A LETTER perfectly defines:
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“Membership in the true universal spiritual Mother Church never began and never ends and has not one thing to do with Boston, except that it embraces the Boston church in its infinite love as it does all that means church wherever found, which is spiritual oneness with God, in other words, man.” (8).
The actual statement in these two points you will find both enlightening and helpful, as you digest this unique, wholly spiritual things, this almost wholly dematerialized thing, that is spiritual organization as Mrs. Eddy actually founded it. But first again, the very essence of it Mrs. Eddy here sets forth in her dissolving request: “Now, dear ones, if you take my advice again, you will do-what? Even this: disorganize the N.C.S.A., and each one return to his place of labor, to work out individually and alone, for himself and others (“both individual and collective” S&H 18), the sublime ends of human life.” (Mis. 137). That last could be phrased, the sublime end of human life. Mrs. Eddy also suggested they not meet again for three years, which they voted and obeyed. To be alone with God, and yet not alone, for all others are thus embraced as His, in His infinite love, in His voluntary but infinite bond wholly of the Spirit. See Mrs. Eddy’s letter for her perfect statement of the task which can accomplish only alone, and thus be able to “give to the world…and heal and teach anew”.
Among the resolutions:
“This Association hereby express their deep sense of the importance of the Teacher to press on in all Christian activities…to more earnest, individual, self devotion to these good works, and especially to the highest,–that of church organization,–on the liens laid down in the Teacher’s communication.”
“We, the students in the U.S. and elsewhere, who use the Bible, and SCIENCE AND HEALTH, given through Mary Baker G. Eddy, as our sole text-books in the ministrations, teaching, and promulgation of Christian Science, and employ and accept no designation but that of Christian Scientists.” In Mrs. Eddy’s final founding, this and not the directors’ creedal amendment of supremacy, official or otherwise, is the one requirement for taking the name and being called, Christian Scientist.
“The members of the Assembly understand the letter of their Teacher, and their present action, not as tending towards disintegration, but to the contrary as footsteps in the way to the real union-that in the consciousness of divine Principle. They adopt, for the government of their relations, instead of the observances of men (that is, the human pattern of organization, with recorded membership and humanly designated “officials”-J.), these words of the Master, ‘This is my commandment that ye be loving one another according as I loved you.’ The action of to-day is the demonstration of the ‘new commandment’ (see Mis. 292-93) given through the beloved disciple, ‘which thing is true in him and in you; that the darkness is passing away; and the Real Light already shines.” Indeed this material dissolving was not no organization, no disintegration, no stopping at all in real working together in C.S. The reverse. Going straight spiritually forward and actively, to the real union in the consciousness of divine Principle. This Mrs. Eddy has founded as organization in Christian Science.
“…every Christian Scientist,–wherever in the world found-who stands on the platform laid down in the second of these resolutions (given above, acceptance of S. & H. etc.-J), is invited to constitute himself or herself a member of this Assembly, by the perception and admission that, ‘all members of the body, many as they are, are one body-thus also the Christ,–and to carry in their daily through this fellowship in
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Spirit.” Now, Mrs….., with the estoppels in the Manual obeyed, materially again dissolving the Mother Church, as it was Dec. 2nd, 1889, is not this resolution an exact description of now obedience to the Manual, in its membership as understanding of the “clear, correct teaching of C.S.” in the spiritual bond only. The voluntary is simply accepting SCIENCE AND HEALTH and taking the name of Christian Science.
The bare bones of a proposition do not constitute or make spirituality. The Spirit alone quickeneth and profiteth. The human mind can conceive of this very simply, informal, but wholly tangible device appearing as human association. But the human mind cannot enter into this reality that mightily works, as the institution of the “clear, correct teaching of Christian Science.” Only the Spirit of Truth and Love can do that, even only as it can heal sin in Christian Science. But just as the argument in Christian Science, as developed in SCIENCE AND HEALTH as infinitum, must be stated correctly, so also the argument or statement of the materially dissolved “institution” founded by Mrs. Eddy must be exactly understood. So must the word of the “clear, correct teaching” be understood, so that the spirit of Love clothes and uses this institution, instead of evil in ignorance of malicious mental malpractice, be entity in deception of person, place, and thing. No formula, even in institution, will avail in Christian Science, for there is no least materiality in it, the infinite Mind of Spirit. But Mrs. Eddy’s divinely founded institution is the least materially dragging and the most spiritually inviting, institution on earth for practice of man’s oneness with God. It offers practically no obstruction to man as the spiritual activity of God as Christian Science.
Before leaving the N.C.S.A., it is important to note how Mrs. Eddy in symbol of spiritual organization, dissolved the field Assembly of Christian Science into the World’s Religious Congress at Chicago in 1893. It was really a merging. The next call after this May 1893 was at this World’s Religious section of that Fair. Mrs. Eddy’s prayer was the prayer used at that Congress, and Christian Science was the only religion for which all the other religions were gathered to have it preached. To the whole world in religion assembled, thirteen papers were read on Christian Science by Mrs. Eddy’s students, and Judge Hanna read Mrs. Eddy’s universal message as the thirteenth message, thus typifying Christ Jesus and his twelve disciples, preaching the gospel to all nations. Mrs. Eddy then had the N.C.S.A. merge itself into this World’s Religious Congress. Could anything in symbol, in tangible record pointing point more to the universal basis and nature of the word and the institution of “the clear, correct teaching of Christian Science”?
As you said, you came to America to learn all you could about Mrs. Eddy’s real founding as church or institution, and about the real understanding of Christian Science, the highest expression of which in the language of others than Mrs. Eddy you had found in the books of Mr. Eustace, and in the state of consciousness of those few in England who had gone his way apart from ecclesiasticism in the “clear, correct teaching” that Mrs. Eddy so gloriously founded. The word and the institution of this together and as one. A LETTER is the perfect statement and demonstration of this. I found it difficult in our talks, just as in this letter, in going into the institutional founding facts, not also constantly to go into its metaphysics, especially as constantly relates to the negation and its reversal.
Now you remarked that a first reaction in England on A LETTER was
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that Mr. Eustace had somewhat or in some way reversed himself, at least a bit. A Scientist from Texas also inferred that. A careful reading of his books will show nothing of the sort. As I said to you, in no phase or area in Mrs. Eddy’s founding of institution or the churches are Christian Scientists so, you may say, totally ignorant, as on what Mrs. Eddy actually founded as organization in Christian Science, the spiritually organized church and the voluntary association in the bond only of Love, the real Christian or spiritual compact. Precisely the one SCIENCE AND HEALTH sets forth as our example from the Master on p. 18. Is it not evident that Christian Scientists as a whole have not had the faintest idea of what Mrs. Eddy has meant by all these numerous phrases and passages, and of what she actually did in defining them? But the record of the great Trial shows that stand by the Trustees was in absolute consonance with it; and Mr. Eustace going right forward with “cct” in His one fidelity since, has been the grand demonstration since Mrs. Eddy’s own, as the voluntary association under God as the bond divine Love knows and is infinitely maintaining as Christian Science.
Any such feeling of even a bit of reversal with Mr. Eustace, is the difficulty at the moment that Scientists, and of the better sort, have in this field of ignorance of the absolutely separate and opposed material organization and spiritual organization in Christian Science. No wonder, Mr. Eustace had to lay heavily and emphatically against the only organization Christian Scientists seemed at all to know. In the early years in Boston as ecclesiasticism pressed more firmly, Mr. Eustace and the Trustees steadily worked and asked for voluntary cooperation in the spiritual bond. The Directors hadn’t the faintest idea of what it was, thought it was so specious, mental slippery dodge, and opposed it increasingly in geometric ratio to the unfoldment of the reality. Mr. Eustace’s final conference with the forbidden Mother Church ecclesiastical directors, on the 11th of March, 1919, (with Rathvon then become the “Charlie McCarthy”) is important in testimony. Read it.
If the careful right use of the word organization in Christian Science today at first blush by awakening thinkers, is thought to be material organization, can you doubt how Mr. Eustace in his earlier first books had to rip the mask off of that? You will so find it in L. of L, 55-57, really right on to page 64. Yet right here on 64, as this concludes, is defined positively and exactly in accord with these instructional or organization foundings rehearsed at same length in this letter: “Freedom can never be obtained in anything, hence in organization there can be no freedom. The one and only organization that constitutes freedom is the organization of Principle and its idea, and in this unity the idea is the very activity of the Principle.” That absolutely squares with the substance and sense of all we see in these dissolvings. That is exactly what Mrs. Eddy has founded as the churches of Christ, Scientist, as soon as they can rise to it; and this is exactly what at the outset in 1929 Mr. Eustace specifically says.
Naturally, as is evident, the necessity in language and ignorance, most of what God directed him to say was in the material and negative uncovering. It is in p. 115-118 that he mentions the prairie schooner and the child you spoke of; but it is materiality calling itself church organization intruding between man and God that he strictly characterizes, a church organization to be in and believe in. That is nothing but is essence malicious mental malpractice, the ecclesiasticism denying the founding of Christian Science, and the Christian Science that is founded, that no materiality or mesmerism can overthrow.
Mr. Eustace speaks with absolute accuracy, and means just this
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when he says in A LETTER, p. 8: “What I have before written in my books in regard to Christian Scientists and church organization only had reference, of course, to the erroneous sense of organization with all its ecclesiastical officialdom, never to what was instituted by Mrs. Eddy.” These foundings of spiritual organization in 1888-90 by Mrs. Eddy, her Manual estoppels and her follow of spiritual founding at the earliest achieving possibility, certainly free the practice of Christian Science, and the churches of Christ, Scientist, from the materiality or organization. Let me quote from CCT., published as you know in 1934:
“I seemed to dimly discern this storm center about which the on-coming struggle would be waged,–the struggle to free Christian Science from the materiality of organization and loose it for its higher destiny of pure metaphysics “uncontaminated and unfettered by human hypotheses and divinely authorized!” (xxl-ii)
“It could not have happened otherwise because, sooner or later, ecclesiasticism must be found by every Christian Scientist to have no relationship whatever to Christian Science. without the despotic control of ecclesiasticism (masquerading as the Christian Science organization and demanding that it be allowed to govern every thought and action of the Christian Scientist) having been expressed we might have remained apathetic for many years, perhaps centuries, before turning to divine Principle as All-in-all.”
“Organization is the eternal oneness of Principle and idea….in the unfolding of this true sense of organization, the first erroneous sense to disappear is ecclesiastical organization, because it is this false sense that poses as the oracle or medium of God and presumes to dictate to man….Ultimately, all sense of finite organization must vanish before the infinity of Mind and its idea-the one organization.” (297) All this involves no change whatever, in the ever-rising entrance point. (306). The entry point now is the spiritual formation we now see Mrs. Eddy founded and authorized.
What I have said about Mr. Eustace position throughout being just the same soundly grounded one of “cct” in its institution, of course has been to bring out the truth of this brief, field reaction that came to you, and not in the least that you at all felt or advanced such a feeling. On this point of how did the Trustees stand in the Trial on Mrs. Eddy’s real, spiritual organization founding, the record is both remarkable and most enlightening, as well as tremendously gratifying in strict conformity.
From first to last the Trustees stood for each Board fully acknowledging and responsible for its own sacred Trust bond with Mrs. Eddy solemnly confirmed in legal public charitable trust in law at equity, but always in full spiritual cooperation in the Spirit and divine Love that is Christian Science. Their business at Court was legal business, and their business as Christian Scientists was to uphold that which the “demon scheme”, the one evil as ecclesiasticism, was attacking, namely, their Deed bond with Mrs. Eddy, and in accord with the legal requirement of that Trust, to uphold “the purpose of more effectually promoting and extending the religion of Christian Science as taught by me.” Note this requirement here even legally confirmed, “as taught by me”, by Mary Baker
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Eddy, in other words, also uphold the “clear, correct teaching of Christian Science”, for this was exactly what Mrs. Eddy taught and the language in understanding of C.S. for all others than herself. Never forget that. From the Science of Man and the first Edition of SCIENCE AND HEALTH, and all the way in all her founded works at the least, and very especially in all that is the immediate course in all specifically bringing forth the “clear, correct teaching” Mrs. Eddy specifically identifies (My 297 and 197), it is the language in understanding of Christian Science for all others than Mrs. Eddy. That is why none can understand C.S. and thus be in the spiritual bond only that is now The Mother Church, unless he understands Mr. Eustace’s books. That is not to say he must come to that understanding thru Mr. Eustace’s books. It is to say, if he comes to the understanding, he will understand and be in full and perfect alignment with all these now impersonal fulfillments in the language of the field by the field, by the other than Mrs. Eddy, of the “clear, correct teaching of Christian Science.”
The Trustees’ position in Court was they were legally obliged, and morally, to be faithful to their Trust bond: but also to the Manual. That contrary to the Directors, the two were not in conflict, but in entire oneness in Mrs. Eddy’s God-directed founding. The Trustees Sept. 30, 1918, as that inevitable clash came to its crisis the coming March, made this immortally clear to the Directors and for all Christian Scientists, a letter that P&D. p. 66 refers to as “perhaps rightly called a second Declaration of Independence. You would not today be enjoying the freedom of that you are, if the truth of that letter had not been the animating motive of Mrs. Eddy’s Deed of Trust of 1898, constituting the trusteeship”, and in CCT p. xxvi, is called “the trustee” understanding of” the true democracy of Christian Science.”
“To be true to this trust there was no other course possible to them than to abide absolutely by the Deed of Trust and the Manual, both in the letter and the spirit….that interpretation could not be done by somebody else for them…This Deed of Trust, according to Sec. 1 of Art XXV of the Church Manual, is inferentially incorporated as part and parcel of the Church Manual…each individual must be held responsible for his own demonstration…God will not allow them (the trustees) to avoid in the slightest degree fulfilling the full requirements of the Deed of Trust and the Manual…our one desire has been to do God’s will and to be obedient to the teachings of Mrs. Eddy, as embodied in the Deed of Trust and the Manual….These two boards, designated and constituted by our Leader, each having its own well defined work…must inevitably cooperate at every point (note this “cooperate at every point” as the spiritual compact Mrs. Eddy has founded for every Christian Scientist in all practice, let alone two boards having even the same worded purpose first given to the trustees as above quoted-J)….Yet, when all is said and done, in spite of the tremendous importance of the letter, still how small is the letter compared to that Spirit that must inspire everything bequeathed to us by our Leader in the service of God. It is in the unity of this Spirit that this letter is written, signed, and sent. Very sincerely yours, Herbert W. Eustace, etc.” (Letter to Directors, Sept. 30, 1918).
Was or was not that letter written in direction by God in the very spirit and understanding of the “cct” of C.S? Just like the trustees
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whole stand throughout, the position is immortal. In Court, counsel for directors at one point accused Mr. Eustace and the trustees—HWE was on the stand—of advocating the destruction of the Mother Church. Mr. Eustace vehemently denied this, not that any trustee had ever even hinted at such. Mr. Krauthoff, a Scientist (and that’s right, he accepted the Bible and S.&H.-J) and chief counsel for directors, was sure Mr. Eustace did not uphold the Manual, and I think he used maybe forty pages in the record to cross-examine HWE on section after section. On each where Mrs. Eddy’s estoppel came in, Mr. Eustace, says, “With Mrs. Eddy not here, I do not see how it can be done.”
A direct attack on materially dissolving the Mother Church at that time, or perhaps even too conscious of this in it entirety, very likely would have defeated His Wisdom and got the trustees’ whole right stand for the Deed and the Manual, which the Deed legally calls for, in its legal requirement of “as taught by me”,–thrown out of Court. “God is never absent from the wisdom He bestows.” Toward the end of the first three months in the full hearings before the Master, Mr. Whipple gave this obedience to the Manual estoppels as straight as you or I could now write the record for him: (Whipple to the Court-Master):
Mrs. Eddy was extremely particular that when her consent was required it was to be in writing-her written consent. The directors speak of the great trust that she had in the directors, but I notice that there was not very much in the Manual that these directors were permitted to do in her lifetime that did not require her written consent. There are 17 places in the Manual (he means written, but there are nearly 40 that in a few varying phrases require Mrs. Eddy’s direct consent-J), practically every important activity, where they had to have her consent, and she showed her confidence in them by taking no chances on their saying that they had her assent by telephone or in some other way; she said ‘written assent’. And one might ask, as he went along, why, in her lifetime, when she was right here to look at them, she would not let them make a move in any activity of any importance without her written consent, and that she gave into their hands, intended (ecclesiasticism, Mrs. …., all the way before through and since the Trial, just as Knapp did last month with you, talks of Mrs. Eddy’s intentional as excuse to get out of facing right up to exactly what our Leader has said and left in the word-J) to give into their hands, this absolutely unlimited and unchecked and unexaminable power to do as they pleased?….According to their theory, she intended, while she did not trust them quite as implicitly in her lifetime, not enough to let them go without her written consent to everything-she intended to give them the most absolute and autocratic power of any ecclesiastical body that I ever heard of outside of one.” (Whipple in summation to Master, Trial Book p. 861).
The Trustees’ stand for cooperation at every point in the one real bond in Christian Science of divine Love, inflexible, infinite Principle, was the reverse and destruction of malicious mind acting as the malicious mental malpractice of “Who shall be greatest.” What does our Leader say on this question so vastly important among mortals in the practice of C.S.?”
“Who shall be greatest? This error violates the law given by Moses, it tramples upon Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, it does violence to the ethics of Christian Science.” (Ret. 75).
“Competition in Commerce, deceit in councils, dishonor in nations,
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dishonesty in trusts, begin with “Who shall be greatest?’ I again repeat, Follow me your Leader, only so far as she follows Christ.” (Mess. ’02:4).
“Significant Questions-Who shall be greatest? Referring to John the Baptist, of whom he said none greater had been born of woman, our Master declared: ‘He that is least in the Kingdom of heaven is greater than he.’ That is, he that hath the Kingdom of heaven, the reign of holiness, in the least in his heart, shall be greatest.” (My 228). It is enlightening that Mrs. Eddy asked this and the other significant questions in this article in May Journal, 1903, just as she was ready to start in June and July her first positive dissolving steps of the material Mother Church.
Thus Mr. Whipple goes on in his summation to the Master, directed by God to verify the faithful trustees, “as taught by me”, the clear, correct teaching:
“The deeds (the ’92 directors deed and the ’98 trustees’ deed-J) as I have said before, are not substantially different. The purposes of the trusts are the same. They are both important. It is childish to discuss which is the most important. People might differ, but they are both important, and the object of them both is the same; and the people given authority under them should work together for a correct result, without stopping to decide which is the biggest trust and who is the most important person.”
As I told you about the Full Bench’s final decision, my recent careful analysis, which I have yet to write up, amazed me. They of course as I knew, openly accepted and affirmed in its entirely all the Master’s full findings of fact, just taking a different twist on the law, to let the directors in, and so apparently save this 1898 Trust from sheer destruction by the hypnotized and mesmerized Christian Science field or movement. What I had not had the faintest idea of, even though previously many times, I had read the final decision, was how wonderfully it does uphold the points basic legally for Mrs. Eddy’s founding in this Deed to function just as she did it, the moment the movement is ready to obey the Manual’s estoppels, and the Mother church materially is dissolved along with the forbidden Mother Church or By-Law directors; into the Mother Church as the spiritual bond or spiritual formation only as the sole reality it is or ever has been. The Full Bench’s final decision is perfectly set for just this one needed requirement, the ablution of the Church By-Law-not Deed directors in obedience to Mrs. Eddy’s express Manual provisions, conveniently called estoppels.
This decision holds (1) that this deed is, so flatly contrary to the directors’ whole basic position, not modified in the slightest by any other document, by which they mean in particular the Manual provisions: (2) that the Manual is not in conflict with this deed, of Mrs. Eddy with her voluntary association organized in Sept. 23rd., ’92, had every right to make all the rules, etc., to which the members agreed, and none of this in any way conflicted or could with her legal provisions in the trusts. From first to last, before, through, and since, Mr. Eustace held there was no conflict whatever, could not be with this God-directed founder and angel-scribe, that both must and could be obeyed to the letter. How wonderful the Court upheld this, for were it not so, some of what our Leader founded would have to be disobeyed. But it is not so! And the Court affirms, even as the trustees stood; (3) at least four times, the Court
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holds and reaffirms that the purpose of this Deed, as stated in the Deed itself, must be and is the sole determining rule and guidance to interpreting and carrying out the Deed. In the message last June at the now forbidden branch or field forgathering as an annual meeting, in the effort to make Scientists think that what they quote from the Court’s final decision is said directly to uphold legally the directors’ supreme control, they quote:
“The promotion of Christian Science as taught by Mrs. Eddy was the end and aim of the trust. To that regnant design all other provisions, not in themselves fixed and unchangeable, must yield. Christian Science as thus taught was disclosed by the writings of the founder.” The Court here is not referring at all to the directors or even their supremacy claim. Rather it here is again affirming that the purpose Mrs. Eddy in the opening sentence of this Deed set out for it – “for the purpose of more effectually promoting and extending the religion of C.S. as taught by me”-and as the Court properly and excellently says, as you see, you look in Mrs. Eddy’s writing to see how “Christian Science (is) thus taught.” It is excellent-you and I could not improve it-that the Court several times affirms this provision as absolutely governing this Deed and its trustees, and get her teaching, the “clear, correct teaching”, from her writings! Yet the directors have here claimed that this regnant demand of this purpose is the Court specifically upholding their “demon” claim: “In their decisions the Directors are governed by their understanding of our Leader’s intentions for her Church…This great fact has been acknowledged by the civil law in a decision of the Supreme Court of Mass. etc.” But the truth and fact is, what the Court is here saying has nothing whatever to do with the Church or directors, but that this Deed must be carried out by its own grand “end and aim.”
In this long awaited #30 of Paul Revere, Reversing the Reversal, they conclude with a special section dealing with this statement of the directors of last June to the field, under the heading, “What is the Difference between Boston and Rome”, and it is fine. But they omit this factual point, which can be stated more forcibly than I have here. But I had not then seen it myself, so could to call it to their attention. (4) Most important, the decision holds that the word in the Deed, “directors”, means not the Deed ’92 directors, but the Church By-Law directors. Where they parted from the master on law, and it was only on law and this point, they held these By-Law Church directors still exercised power of removal even though it could no longer be exercised jointly with first members as the Deed provided. This holding that the “directors” there in the Deed legally referred to, are Church not Deed directors, is wholly consonant with their emphatic position in the decision that the ’98 Deed is not altered or modified in the slightest, nor its purpose by the Manual. The Deed they say, thank God, is absolutely complete and governed solely by its own terms.
Now the Court could hardly be expected to go on and say, yes, but these church directors-Mother Church By-Law directors-Mrs. Eddy forbids to go on, so they have no removal power, and of course the ’92 Deed directors cannot, for we rule Mrs. Eddy never meant them when she used the word, “directors” in that Deed. Their reasoning here is simple and irrefutable: she used it jointly with “First Members”, whose sole existence is in this voluntary association of Sept. 23rd, ’92, so she and all must have understood this removal there given in the ’98 Deed was just a part of her Church By-Law plans and changes of plans, as she went along, entirely as
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was her right, and with no conflict at all with her legal deeds. The Court in law can and does rule contractual provisions not fulfillable through decease can be waived. With the wholly visibly aggressive C.S. movement waiving these estoppels in the Manual, no longer permitting or leaving Mother Church By-Law directors, why should the Mass. Supreme Court with its accustomed legal habit of waiving have tried to force obedience on the mass of Christian Scientists to their own Manual By-Laws?
The real answer is, God would not let them. They saw it would likely destroy the trust. It likely would have caused that ancient evil of schism. Ecclesiasticism, as Mr. Eustace has so marvelously put it in the L. of L, and To The Reader, had to be absolutely enthroned, that God in His infinite negative moving as ecclesiasticism, right along with his wondrous pure, positive moving as the full and final impersonal moving as the “clear, correct teaching of C.S.,” would bring forth the fruit of “Christian Scientists attest(ing) their fidelity”, so that “in the twentieth century every Christian church in our land, and a few in far-off lands, will approximate the understanding of C.S….and Christendom will be classified as Christian Scientists.” (Pul. 22). But while God would not let the Court rule other than as it seemed to the movement at the moment, He also made the Court lay the right stones for future, all in His order, when the hour of glad acceptance and obedience to the Manual comes!
I’ll never forget the story John Watts told me. He was the Business Mgr. at the Publ Soc’y. during the Trial. He was with Mr. Eustace when the decision reached them, and read it to HWE. Both, from the Master’s ruling, had fully expected to sense final full confirmation. Watts said when he got to where he was it starring the other way, he faltered. I supposed his throat tightened a bit. He said Mr. Eustace said, “Go right on. God has written every word of this decision. It is just as He wants it.” Not one blink, said Watts, with him who had faithfully and correctly stood, “as taught by me”. HWE knew in the understanding, that only “cct” gives, God as All-in-all included all and so wrote every line of that final decision. Time and growth is revealing what there in the conviction was understanding, how absolutely right and perfect that conviction was! Your own awakening and your coming to America, or this pearl or golden grail, is just one more proof, now passing from its rivulet to the beginnings of its flood-tide.
What are a few of these reversals, the specious arguments by which ecclesiasticism attempts to hold in hypnotic bondage the innocent and ignorant Christian Scientist? It loves to talk of Mrs. Eddy’s intentions! As the directors did in their last June message, as Bliss Knapp did to you, as Cliff. Smith in starting that since continued and expanded pamphlet, “Permanency of The Mother Church, Mrs. Eddy’s Expressed Intention.”
Why intention? Why not, just what Mrs. Eddy did and said? Has not Mrs. Eddy specifically founded, and fully, her intention, His intention, so the question always is, What is the actual record. Evil speaks of intention, either to misstate, or subtly to start a partial or full truth misinterpretation; precisely as Smith said here in ’27 says, “It is asserted by some that this church should be abandoned or dissolved because Mrs. Eddy cannot be consulted in the course of its administration.” Not one word anywhere about what these estoppels add up to and mean, or why Mrs. Eddy left them; not one look at them in the whole article for some light on Mrs. Eddy’s intention in leaving hem. Just this sly start to make you forget precisely what Mrs. Eddy has left in the record for
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our guidance, which is all spiritual.
Evil says Mrs. Eddy stated the truth on church in the first edition of SCIENCE AND HEALTH, and many other times, but she had to go back on it, back on her Principle and high conviction of C.S., and found a material church for the present material state of thought Christian Scientists and the world are now in. As Dunn, the present editor, so well states that, in his 1934 article now in this Permanency pamphlet: “When he shall have been completely delivered from all error, he will not need church….In a word, mortals need church because they are sinners.” (22-23). Mrs. Eddy’s concession to church organization from 1879 was only momentarily to language, never in the slightest departure from the Principle and rule of Christian Science. Evil used ignorance of just what the concession was, of its temporary nature, and above all, ignorance of her founding in the “clear, correct teaching” of both word and institution, ignorance of malicious mental malpractice and ignorance of the spiritually organized church or one bond in Christian Science, to foist that viciously malicious assertion about our beloved and infinitely God-directed Leader! The real and final viciousness of that belief is only seen in its effect on its believer. If he believes the Founder, the Discoverer, the Leader in this word, had to give way to malicious mind in church organization, depart in founding from the bond of Spirit to founding this material bond, can any such believer possibly help from bowing down to malicious mind and materiality himself? He cannot, and can only speed his progress to the funeral and six foot under.
Evil says the Aug. ’79 Church was material – Dickey says because it rested on law, Knapp says because Mrs. Eddy had no vote and did not control etc.-the Dec. 2, ’89 dissolved Church was a sort of no organization blank and hiatus, and the Sept. 23rd Church was spiritual. When I get to briefing all these varying arguments of evil from the Boston “voices”, they are so funny it will be fun. This in between, forgotten period, Dec. ’89 to Sept. ’92, is of course the fullness of Mrs. Eddy’s founding of the one organization in C.S. But illustrated and proved and fully exemplified in all Mrs. Eddy did with the other two, just as God directed her, even as He must and ever communicates Himself to His own idea: “Son, all that I have is thine.” Each of these three steps and churches, in its actual founding steps and history, is immortal proof of the Principle of Christian Science and its church, man as the activity of God. And this statement is true from any possible way you can look at all Mrs. Eddy did with church and these three, providing you see exactly what she did and why she did it! In the Dec. 2, ’89 Church the concession was removed for the spiritually organized institution in C.S. In the Sept. 23rd, ’92 Church the concession was half-restored only. As Mrs. Eddy puts it to Johnson in letter of Sept. 29, 1892, “The First Church of Christ, Scientist has been semi-organized.” That means Mrs. Eddy had permitted it again the human pattern of recorded membership and “elected” officials, but had refused to permit it to own property, thus again insuring her full authority to order its material dissolution, to its previous Dec. ”89 spiritually organized state, when she had completed her world founding of the “clear, correct” practice.
In this complete befuddling of the founding of the three churches, evil gets conviction in the ignorant Christian Scientist that he cannot have Christian Science and its infinite blessing and hope to fear-filled mortals, unless one accepts and immerses himself in material church organization. At that point in conviction, evil has its victim thoroughly cut
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off from “Christian Science as taught by me”. Yet what is, in all this? God infinitely showing forth what Christian Science is, what church is, what man is, what all Mrs. Eddy’s founding as C.S. in word and institution is, by showing with infinite illumination, what it is NOT. Now, we are the child of God, now we are living in the kingdom, not shall be.
Signed: Joseph E. Johnston
* * * * * * * * * *
Christmas Evening, 1947.
Dear Eleanor and Walter:
. . . . .(personal)
In its about total ignorance of evil as the negation or malicious mental malpractice, and of what organization in Christian Science is, and of what Mrs. Eddy actually founded as organization or the churches in Christian Science, no wonder most Christian Scientists these many years have been able to think of the Mother Church only in the belief of material organization. To think of the Mother Church of Christ, Scientist only as materially organized, and so of each and all these churches as materially organized. In their ignorance of both Christian Science and its institution, which of course is absolutely one, they think the concession Mrs. Eddy made was really a concession now of man and so the movement in a material state, and that to meet this present material state of belief of Christian Scientists and the world, Mrs. Eddy really had to and did depart from Christian Science, and actually founded a material church organization “for the purpose of more effectually promoting and extending the
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religion of Christian Science as taught by me”.
Where can any Christian Scientist land, who believes Mrs. Eddy found that we are still in such a material degree and state of thought, that she had to turn her back on Christian Science and Principle in founding church, and as a concession to this material belief ascribed to her, as a suffer it, Mrs. Eddy did in fact found a material organization as her and the Christian Science church? Only one thing can happen to that Scientist, and that is, he has permanently so long as he holds that belief about Mrs. Eddy and her founding, separated himself from Christian Science and its divine Principle and enmeshed himself in materiality. The Christian Science movement cannot possibly escape from the materiality of ecclesiasticism and the loss of Christian Science, just so long as it attaches this ignorance and malice to Mrs. Eddy’s glorious founding of the bond only of divine Love as the spiritually formed or organized church that is her Church of Christ, Scientist.
Let me put how I stated in a letter week ago, of the inevitable result of this vicious belief, about Mrs. Eddy’s immortal and spiritual founding, to the believer:
“Evil says Mrs. Eddy stated the truth on church in the first edition of SCIENCE AND HEALTH, and many other times. But she had to go back on it, back on her Principle and high conviction of Christian Science, and found a material church for the present material state of thought Christian Scientists and the world are now in. As Dunn, the present editor, so well states that, in his 1934 article now in the Permanency pamphlet: ‘When he shall have been completely delivered from all error, he will not need church…In a word, mortals need church because they are sinners.’ (22-23). Mrs. Eddy’s concession to church organization from 1879 was only momentarily to language, never in the slightest a departure from the Principle and rule of Christian Science. Evil uses ignorance of just what the concession was, of its temporary nature, and above all, ignorance of her founding in the ‘clear, correct teaching’ of both word and institution, ignorance of malicious mental malpractice and ignorance of the spiritually organized church or one bond in Christian Science, to foist that viciously malicious assertion about our beloved and infinitely God-directed Leader! The real and final viciousness of that belief is only seen in its effect on its believer. If he believes the Founder, the Discoverer, the Leader in this word, had to give way to malicious mind in church organization, depart from in founding from the bond of Spirit to founding this material bond, can any such believer possibly help from bowing down to malicious mind and materiality himself? He cannot, and can only thus speed his progress to the funeral and six feet under.”
Since starting this letter, one from HWE is in, with its wonderful news that he has sent PR cheque to mail #30 to the Journal CSB’s, not to mention query as to cost of mailing to all in the Journal. He says: “By the way, do you know that only 200 names as teachers being left in the Journal is an amazing thing. There has surely been a tremendous ‘slaughtering of the innocents’ to have reduced their numbers to such a small amount. I am surprised, although I knew after they accepted Mrs. Eddy as dying they rapidly interpreted that they too could die and they have been doing so and no wonder.” Is not this the same thing, just another phase of what inevitably must happen in accepting malicious mind and any phase of Mrs. Eddy’s founding and oneness with Christian Science? In violation of the Manual, which must have been carried on in Dec.1910 without Mrs. Eddy’s signature on certificates for degrees, already thirteen classes for teachers and giving degrees have been held. This would seem to about account of less than those since 1910, let alone those before then such as HWE with Mrs. Eddy’s authorizing signature.
But Mrs. Eddy did not die in belief of the second death, as all but those in the line of light have believed; and Mrs. Eddy never founded, even in temporary concession, a material church organization in Christian Science, or a material anything else. Her concession was strictly in line with the perfect example by her and our Exemplar, Christ Jesus: “Jesus’ concession (in certain cases) to material methods were of the advancement of spiritual good.” (S&H 56). This was simply the language given it by another, not at all the spiritual reality shown forth. The Mind apart from God is never the Mind that can advance or advance toward “spiritual good”.
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What an interesting thing it was, that this English Lady, Mrs. Porter and her young friend, Diana Pine, stopped in Wn. with Mrs. Selko. Her whole awakening in England to “clear, correct teaching”, and coming to America to follow as far as she can in its word and institution, is in exemplification of real Christian Science. We had some lengthy conferences, and she has a real start. She is going to San Jose, as doubtless Mrs. Selko told you, for a protracted spell. As a result of our talks, I have written several memo-letters, up to twenty pages for one. You would enjoy the material in them, but they are long and you are to busy now. I had just received and read #30 the day before our last main conference. I read her a bit and arranged to have PR send two to her in New Orleans, as I was afraid she would not be in W. long enough. Imagine my surprise when Mrs. Selko wrote they had stopped with her and she had presented them in person! It was just as well as I sent her a twenty pager to N.O. England must have someone absolutely straight as a die on the “cct” or actual founding of both word and institution.
Now back to #30. You don’t need me to tell you, Eleanor, how find it is, and let me thank you with a capital T for following through so splendidly. When people are not together, covering Mrs. Eddy’s almost unknown but so vastly important founding to bring forth its true and spiritual significance and oneness, at best is not an easy task. It is always difficult to work material over importantly, compared to carefully planning it out in the beginning. That whole week in March was an example. But what made it still so very difficult in the summer, was the fact that in March I had not seen the full final, spiritual founding in institution, in spite of the fact I had been on the trail of it for I guess nearly a year and a half. It was then I saw how far the copy sent up in June or July still fell quite short of really making clear this divinely unique founding of the Church of Christ, Scientist, in the organization or bond only of divine Love.
A LETTER, of course, gives one magnificent statement of it: “Voluntary association under God is the only bond Love knows. That bond is the divine unity that brings forth the fruits of Love and ensures genuine brotherly love.” The statements of Mrs. Eddy right from 1870 on, run to the exact point literally into the hundreds, and I am working out a classification to directly quote some-what seem most important-then in the straight chronology in order, list for immediate reference the rest. What a parody of Mrs. Eddy’s one and glorious founding, the word and institution always one, this malicious, damning belief our Leader founded materiality in the working together of Christian Scientists! Here is just one more, back in the eighties, and one more new phrase-“the indissoluble bond of union”-in her wholly spiritual, one founding with God as Christian Science:
“Philip’s requirement was, that he should not only acknowledge the incarnation-God made manifest through man,–but even the eternal unity of man and God, as the divine Principle and spiritual idea; which is the indissoluble bond of union, the power and presence, in divine Science, of Life, Truth, and Love, to support their ideal man. This is the Father’s great Love that He hath bestowed upon us, and it holds man in endless Life and one eternal round of harmonious being. It guides him by Truth that knows no error, and with supersensual, impartial, and unquenchable Love. …It was to under God and man: it was (note right there the open door or “no watch” through which evil as ecclesiasticism has ensnared its every victim-J.) sternly to rebuke the mortal belief that man has fallen away from his first estate; that man, made in God’s own likeness, and reflecting Truth, could fall into mortal error; or, that man is the father of man. It was to enter unshod the Holy of Holies, where the miracle of grace appears, and where the miracles of Jesus had their birth,–healing the sick, casting out evils, and resurrecting the human sense to the belief that Life, God, is not buried in matter. This is the spiritual dawn of the Messiah, and the overture of the angel’s.” (Mis. 77-8).
What Christian Scientist really wants any organization but this, the self-same on which the salvation of Philip the eunuch depended and did in fact save to “one eternal round of harmonious being.” And what else did Mrs. Eddy ever found, every step of the way, in word and institution? A new slogan for mid-twentieth century Christian Scientists might well be, The understanding of the negation as malicious mental mal-
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practice in the voluntary bond rests only upon, and therefore can never lose, divine Love. In 1894 when Mrs. Eddy put the following on the opening page of the Journal, later to incorporate in Mis. 144-45 in her May Mother Church Corner-stone Address, she knew for her followers, her spiritual founding prophecy, for both her Boston Church and for the churches, was ahead; but to see the truth is to see it now at hand: “The Church…should be the bulwark of civil and religious liberty…the time cometh when the religious element, or Church of Christ, shall exist alone in the affections, and need no organization to express it.”
When Mrs. Eddy prophesied in 1890, that about a half century would find evil as malicious mental malpractice publicly understood, was not Mrs. Eddy also prophesying that same hour would be the approaching hour of the Church of Christ, Scientist, in its spiritual bond or organization “alone in the affections”? Is it not clear now that only that organization alone can avail and promote the growth of Christian Science? You know what you see and have seen. I am positive, Eleanor, the genesis of #30 in your thought, was your determination to understand that mystery-the-of evil, the negation, and your determined following in that line of light. We will either get our whole universe into the kingdom of heaven, or nearly perforce we will be found counted with the lamented ecclesiasticism: “Evil is neither quality nor quantity: it is not intelligence, a person or a principle, a man or a woman, a place or a thing, and God never made it.” (Mess. ‘01.12); “The consciousness of light is like the eternal law of God, revealing Him and nothing else.” (No. 30).
#30 certainly presents on the whole a clear story revealing the institutional founding, and both of you certainly are to be congratulated in getting out so fine as you have. There are a few things I want to take up with you, that should if possible have attention before any important re-run is made, should that occur. I think I can best go into these when you are here this coming week end. Mr. Eustace says he is getting your idea of the cost to send these out to all in the Journal. I have just checked with the Orgains, who as you know, did this with “Whither?” There are about 10,000 in the Journal, say they; the addressing was $5.75 per M and the mailing the same. In short, $11.50 per M plus the stamps, and the cost of printing. Thus the stamps would exceed $300 by a small amount, the addressing and mailing under $125, and on a large run, could these be printed for 15 to 20¢? I am guessing and asking. Of course, any type changes would cost some, but I doubt much even to make it perfect.
If it goes out to all the listed practitioners, it should be perfect in the practical sense, and I can tell you more easily than writing it out. There are two wrong dates, typographical I imagine, and one word. That is nothing. Two or three more headings would be important, and a little rephrasing on a few, not much. Several points can be and on a reprinting should be, shaped a bit more directly to the one significance of the whole, as for example, the dedication of the Extension. It certainly did seat a larger audience and that was important. That larger and sumptuously beautiful edifice also helped gain the world’s respect, so important in concluding the world founding. But most, in symbol this marks the crowning, the acknowledgement by Mrs. Eddy and the field alike, that the churches have been founded to the world, and the work is done. Just as the Mother Church was the symbol of Mrs. Eddy’s Mothering work being completed as she said, and ready to move on to the world task with the churches. What Mrs. Eddy did in both accepting and rejecting with the Mother Church is precisely the example now for all Christian Scientists, and can be very simply shaped to that; etc.
I am only saying this in case of a reprint, and not to reflect at all on it as is. Two or three phrasing and one in particular are important. I shall have these in hand when you come. It really is almost a miracle it is as good as it is, and at last PR has sunk deep and hard; it is really enlightening on the founding and reversal. It is excellent and splendid. The letter of the woman who wrote at length about Mrs. Stetson I would like to see, as this must be handled in the founding. I’ll have to get more of the point of view there involved, but not any personality. If you have lost my phone no., it is .xxx. Be sure to allow yourself plenty of time here, and meanwhile our best to all in the new home.
Sincerely as ever,
-5 P.S.
This horrendous snow of two feet you’ve heard about if not seen in Md.-a thing of beauty and a joy to watch from our windows-held this over until this A.M., Sat., so I’ll add a bit.
On this point of believing, as all those do who cling to it, that we must have this Boston ecclesiasticism and the materially organized Church of Christ, Scientist, because we are all now in a material state of thought and belief, how God-directed to this lie is the preface Mrs. Eddy put in the Dec. ’89 Journal, as the reason why the College material dissolvings of Oct. 29th were adopted: “The preamble and resolutions published herewith explain so fully as to preclude comment, the latest of the steps by which we are being led to the fuller consciousness that ‘man is, not will be, spiritual,’-that we are living in (original italics) the spiritual world, not in one that is material.” (p. 454). Then follow the resolutions, just as in Ret. 48-49, except that Mrs. Eddy omits-doubtless because she again had temporarily to institute auxiliary teaching-these are two further wonderful statements on spiritual formation wholly in teaching:
“Resolved, That an Institution for instruction in Christian Science, which is the highest, purest, and noblest of all teaching, should be of a spiritual formation wholly outside of material regulations, forms, or customs.”
“Resolved, That we find no platform in Christ’s teachings for such material methods of instruction in Christian Science, and we must come into the meekness of his methods as we rise in Christian experience; further”,
Then comes the end, thanking the State for its charter etc., as in Ret. On the second point, finding no platform in Christ’s teachings, for material methods of instruction, Mrs. Eddy embodies that in Mis. 274:1. On the reason presented in the Journal for this dissolving, we are now living in the spiritual world, in Sept. 1910, in almost her last spiritual instruction as the “clear, correct teaching”, Mrs. Eddy again had to state this very and all fundamental of Christian Science: “You can never demonstrate spirituality until you declare yourself to be immortal and understand that you are so. Christian Science is absolute; it is neither behind the point of perfection nor advancing towards it; it is at this point and must be practiced therefrom. Unless you fully perceive that you are the child of God, hence perfect, you have no Principle to demonstrate and no rule for its demonstration.” (My. 242).
Boston and field ecclesiasticism and all belief in material organization, and above all, Mrs. Eddy as our Leader founding in Christian Science this evil in high places, is ignorance of Christian Science open to the flood-gates of malicious mental malpractice. Mrs. Eddy’s here “clear, correct teaching of Christian Science”, is the law of spontaneous reversal and annihilation to all personal control, personality, and materiality, in whichever of “the seven vials full of the seven last plagues.” (S&H. 57)
The refrain of this letter is, Back to #30. On second thought I am wondering if the cost Mr. Orgain gave me yest’y., of $5.75 per M for addressing, and the same for mailing, included the cost of the envelope? I doubt it. Anyway, from your experience or bids you will get, you will know. The next thing is, Why cannot PR, if it seems desirable to send #30 to all practitioners, sent a letter to its selected list, explaining the objective and desire for contributions to that end, with the approximate estimated cost, and that an accounting of funds received will be given, with all received over the amount required, returned or used by sender as directed? One hundred people averaging $25 each ought to cover it or a goodly portion. HWE is so very generous, he should not be imposed upon in the least! Of course, it is strictly the question of what God directs to do and how to do it. this is the only demonstration that is demonstration that our friends like to talk about. Everything is demonstration, but the question is Whose?
Now again, all I said about most of any revision, relates to a reprint to be sent to all the practitioners. That is an excellent and it can still be made more effective. That ending I think is about perfect; I recall, Eleanor, your saying how you and Walt sweated over it, you can’t improve it. It has the poise and confidence of Mind. The answer to the directors in June is excellent; I think I returned
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it at the time with no suggestions. But later I saw in their article a wonderful opening to reverse. They give a direct quote from the final decision, trying to twist it into the Court upholding their ecclesiastical supremacy as Mrs. Eddy’s “regnant plan”. The fact is it does not relate to the Directors in any way, even distantly. It relates wholly to the ’98 Deed, again affirming as it does in several other places that this Deed is not modified by any other document, meaning the Manual in particular, and is governed wholly by the purposes that Mrs. Eddy states in this Deed itself, the same as you have it quoted in #30. It is a wonderful mistake to give them a powerful punch on the Deed, and the Court’s decision. But at that time, I had not studied the final decision, so did not see it. You will be amazed when you understand what is in that final Full Bench decision. I assume you don’t.
The one sentence in #30 that is most in need of revision is this: “That does not mean that she authorized the dissolution of the organization or of the local (or branch) churches, but only of the centrally controlled Mother Church in Boston.” If I wrote that to you, my full apology. Mrs. Eddy, of course, not only authorized the dissolution of the material organization of the local churches of the spiritual formation or organization, she all the way demanded the churches come to it just as fast as they could demonstrate it. You know that, of course, and it is well brought out, and especially on p. 14 and leading to that. I know what is meant here on this p. 16, that then or at that time, Mrs. Eddy did not require them also to materially dissolve. Mrs. Eddy specifically says that, I think in more than one place. But we certainly do not want all these Christian Scientists looking for light where ignorance has reigned, going around with the belief that the Mother Church should be materially dissolved, but all churches of Christ, Scientist, Mrs. Eddy “intended” to be materially organized. For one example, look at the 3rd Church Houston. They may be one or two other lesser spots where the use of the word organization, or of carrying on the organization, give evil a better than a less opportunity to reverse you.
Anyway, I’ll make up a rough memo for discussion, out to very brief, and then to a field re-issue. I’ll send this special delivery to help it along tomorrow, but that may mean nothing in Indian Head. A good conference will be a good way to open 1948. That year should certainly and will, complete my research work; and look how that year already is rolling, with A LETTER and #30 about their destined task. Happy New Year to the “Woods”, all in it, and to the world we each live in.
JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON
* * * * * * * * * *
28 Dec., ’47-Sun.
Dear Mrs. S–:
…I gave Mrs. Porter as I suppose she told you, all the time she could spare, for she has come solidly forward in the only way ecclesiasticism will be translated into the spiritual organization or formation or bond in Love only, which is the spiritually organized church or institution that Mrs. Eddy alone has founded. That way solely in the understanding of Christian Science, in the sole desire to understand its “clear, correct teaching”. If she told you of her steps, you will see just how this was, and in removing her then practice and card in the Journal, and in coming to America, to learn all she possibly can, on the “clear, correct teaching of Christian Science”, (My 297), of both the word and the institution. These are absolutely one, and could not possibly be two or matter and Mind, so the church must be found exactly as Mrs. Eddy founded it, wholly spiritual and spiritual knowing, in other words, man in oneness with and the exact showing forth or activity of God. All else is but direction by malicious minds as malicious mental malpractice. How else then can there be but the one way of understanding Christian Science, as the one way of translating into and destroying ecclesiasticism as, the Church of Christ, Scientist?
That is exactly why in the December 1889 Journal, along with its dissolving resolutions of the College into the spiritual formation, and with the Dec. 2, ’89 dissolving of the material Mother church organization, Mrs. Eddy had published the full spiritual analysis and explanation of this material dissolving for the spiritually organized in Christian Science. Mrs. Eddy headed the explanation THE WAY, now to be found in Mis. 355-359. It concludes by saying the churches can go ahead then with this pattern of human organization, just as the ’79 Church started, but just as soon as they can understand Christian Science, they must follow the example of the Alma Mater. The churches to-day I think you can say, have not even yet conceived that this spiritual formation is what Mrs. Eddy actually has founded for them, and requires them to advance to in understanding. The positive, glorious demonstration of the spiritual bond only in Christian Science, since our Leader left us to advance the impersonal understanding of Christian Science that alone gives this proof, has been in the great Trial and the fulfillment of it since in the now full impersonal statement and form of “clear, correct teaching” in Mr. Eustace books and pamphlets. Do you have all his books and his last A LETTER, that so wonderfully states Mrs. Eddy’s founding and vast spiritual activity now unfolding?
To drive home to Christian Scientists at that time the essence of Mrs. Eddy’s wholly spiritual founding as institution, Mrs. Eddy had this inserted in the Feb. Journal right after this famous and spiritually “loaded to its gunnels” one in Dec. 1889: “The Boston Church of Christ (Scientist). The dissolution of the visible organization of the Church is the sequence and complement of that of the College Corporation and Association. The College disappeared, ‘that the spirit of Christ might have freer course among its students and all who come into the understanding of divine Science’; the bonds of the organization of the Church were thrown away, so that its
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members might assemble themselves together and ‘provoke one another to good works’ in the bond only of Love.
“All that is needed in explanation of the above named changes is found in the concluding paragraphs of the article, ‘The Way’ written by the Teacher (Journal for December): ‘When students have fulfilled all the good ends of organization, and are convinced that by leaving the material forms thereof a higher spiritual unity is won, then is the time to follow the example of the Alma Mater.” “For Jesus to walk the water was scientific insomuch as he was able to do this.” … “Peter’s impetuosity was rebuked. He had to learn from experience; so have we. The methods of our master were in advance of the period in which he personally appeared. But his example was right, and is available at the right time.” (566-Feb. ’90).
If you will turn to My. 356-357, you will see Mrs. Eddy twenty years later in 1909, and it is one of the last words on the subject, says precisely the same thing, to build in church on a wholly spiritual foundation. She also precisely explains what has always stood in the way of this wholly spiritual foundation, before and since 1889, malicious mental malpractice: “The only incentive of a mistaken sense is malicious animal magnetism,–the name of all evil,–and this must be understood.” The fact that in 1889 Mrs. Eddy tenderly and loving makes clear that her following “Peters” could come to this high goal of her founding only in “the understanding of divine Science”, and must move with spiritual experience and not impetuosity, to Christ Jesus and her right example at the right time; and the further fact that in the June 1890 Journal (see Whoso Readeth 14) Mrs. Eddy predicted the need of a half century for malicious mental malpractice publicly to be understood; and the further fact that Whoso has fulfilled that prophecy, and Paul Revere incidentally certainly, also has made it a matter of public discussion,–is it then not evident that the understanding and the spiritual experience is approaching the right time for Mrs. Eddy’s right and grand wholly spiritual founding in its “clear, correct teaching”, in both its word and institution alike? You know it is and must be, and that is why A LETTER states with absolute correctness “the fact that we are NOW in the greatest spiritual renaissance the world has ever experienced and he is single minded in his determination to give his ‘all’ and to show forth by his works his full understanding of this unprecedented unfoldment and grand opportunity, and so be counted worthy of his high calling as the Christian Scientist, the light of the world, set on a hill, as Jesus said, that cannot be hid.” (9).
Ignorance of malicious mental malpractice is, of course, at one with being victim of direction by malicious minds, the negative interpretation of the one direction by the one Director, God, the All-in-all and Only. Such negative interpretation cannot find all in the kingdom of heaven. It must perforce believe man is in a material state he must get out of, which is exactly the position of ecclesiasticism, holding its material organization and material, human control alone will save. That is why Mrs. Eddy in Ret., in her ringing chapter classifies the three together: “Sin, Sinner, and Ecclesiasticism”. That is why the ecclesiastic, D– the present editor in Boston, in the Permanency of the Mother Church pamphlet, also has to say: “When he shall have been completely delivered from all error, he will not need church…In a word, mortals need church because they are sinners.” (22-23).
If you will turn to My. 241-242, you will see that almost in the last hours, Sept. 1910, Mrs. Eddy had again to meet that denial and negation of Christian Science. Indeed not this belief in another than Mind, this belief in malicious mind as man’s present state, can materially dissolve into the spiritually organized founding, put nowhere better I think than in A LETTER: “Voluntary association under God is the only bond Love knows. That bond is the divine unity that brings forth the fruits of Love and ensures genuine brotherly love.” (6). What then could have been more informing, correct, and enlightening, than the basic scientific reason Mrs. Eddy gave in the Dec. 1889 Journal, for the College resolutions materially dissolving it into what twice there calls its “spiritual formation”? This basic reason introduction, and two additional resolutions, both pertaining to teaching, were left out of the most of it now found in Ret. 48-49.
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Ecclesiasticism must hide from itself this glorious presence of God as man’s now All reality: “CLOSING OF THE MASSACHUSETTS METAPHYSICAL COLLEGE. The preamble and resolutions published herewith explain so fully as to preclude comment, the latest steps by which we are being led to the fuller consciousness that ‘man is, not will be, spiritual, ‘-that we are living in the spiritual world, not in one that is material.” (454-original italics). Only by moving ecclesiastically in His “postulate of error” (Mis. 57, S&H. 288) since Mrs. Eddy’s leaving to insure the absolute impersonality of the word as Christian Science, could the understanding of Christian Science be fully freed and defined, and Christian Science be established for its glorious prophecy and hope for the twentieth century. #30 ends on this perfect note, just right.
Teaching Christian Science is, of course, at the highest point in its work, so fraught for good or evil. That is why Mrs. Eddy had to found not only, but why this founding is one of the most important phases of her founding, her founding of the “clear, correct teaching of Christian Science.” In fact must not we say this is the most important phase of her founding, for it has assured the continuing understanding of Christian Science on earth after Mrs. Eddy’s personal direction and personal upholding of the one teaching that is Christian Science? This founding again, Christian Scientists are but meagerly if at all aware of. Mrs. Eddy not only founded its particular golden threat or line of light, but embraced within her “clear, correct teaching” the whole of what she founded as the word of Christian Science, right from her first Science of Man in 1870. It is all one, all whole, word and institution, every founding act and fact.
Thus the high pinnacle of rightness demanded in teachings Christian Science, make especially noteworthy the two dissolving resolutions in the College dissolving on teaching. Doubtless Mrs. Eddy had to omit these from Ret., for she again as you know, in 1898 has to make a temporary organization concession, to finish her task of lifting up the churches and practice to the world. To the casual it might have looked a bit confusing or inconsistent; but as you know, Mrs. Eddy put her estoppel to it, simultaneously with its reopening of her College. She even nailed it down with several more estoppels later, as her personal signature for its degree. Could it be otherwise, that only as one turns from materially organized teaching of Christian Science, all forbidden since 1907–the Dec. 1910 class was too late-can he find the glorious “clear, correct teaching” that Mrs. Eddy has founded to be learned in the voluntary association under God as Love, learned only in the spiritual formation and the spiritual bond?
Here are the dissolving of materially organized teaching resolutions, in the action take Oct. 29, ’89, as published in the Dec. ’89 Journal:
“Resolved, That an Institution for instruction in Christian Science, which is the highest, purest, and noblest of all teaching, should be of a spiritual formation wholly outside of material regulations, forms, or customs.”
“Resolved, That we find no platform in Christ’s teachings for such material methods of instruction in Christian Science, and we must come into the meekness of his methods as we rise in Christian experience; further”,–and then comes the closing as given in Ret., thanking the State for its charter etc.
In Mis. 274, Mrs. Eddy covers the point in the second resolution, that Jesus left “no Biblical authority for a public institution.” Well, neither did Mrs. Eddy. That is where her estoppels come in. When Scientists see what Mrs. Eddy really did and why she did it, they will see she never made one concession in the founding to matter and malicious mind. Rather she faithfully obeyed God’s direction and followed her and our Exemplar in his example: “Jesus’ concession (in certain cases) to material methods were for the advancement of spiritual good.” (S&H. 56). Can any violation of the First Commandment ever advance spiritual good? You know it cannot. Jesus as the personal embodiment and presence of the Truth, had not the same concession as Mrs. Eddy to make. But neither ever conceded to anything apart from or contrary to God and His Christ, to His allness, “to whom belong all things”: “If there be any monopoly in my teaching, it lies in this utter reliance upon the one God, to whom belong all things.” (Un. 10).
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In a sense the College was a more formal institution, with its legal degrees, than a legally chartered church. I think that is why Mrs. Eddy speaks thus. But look how wondrously God provided that absolutely indispensable founding protection for Mrs. Eddy. As she says in the Preface to SCIENCE AND HEALTH, in these seven years from 1882 to 1889, she directly taught to over 4000-four thousand-the very Spirit and presence of God as Christian Science. Ah, what concession there to materiality! As she taught, especially from 1885 on, even many who studied, I should say perhaps some, with her, went right out perverting the teaching and the teacher, and Mrs. Eddy had to hold her degree certificates to her annual resignature on it, to hold down the malpractitioners and protect the public, until Mrs. Eddy could complete her full world founding for all.
Just look how God handled it! He got the Mass. law passed in 1874, Mrs. Eddy’s charter in 1881 to protect her “clear, correct teaching” was the first charter taken under this law, and He closed it within the year, with this one charter the only one the law ever authorized. Thus this in her founding work, legal degree from her, in Mrs. Eddy’s desperate battle for this “highest, purest, and noblest of all teaching,” was not a perfect tool, but what a mighty aid it was, how uniquely God handled it all for His glorious founding. Was not this temporary step taken solely to “advance spiritual good”, with that mighty result many, many fold? Naturally like all the concessions, its was temporary, for the founding was a temporary task God had divinely assigned to Mrs. Eddy, for her herself alone to complete. Had Mrs. Eddy ever departed from the Mind that is Christian Science, how in the world could she have founded it? How silly, and far worse in malice that can only destroy its believer, thinking Mrs. Eddy ever organized and bowed down to materiality and “now are we the temporary sons of perdition”. One may be pardoned a smile, seeing these ecclesiastics carrying sin in high places as the Church of Christ, Scientist Mrs. Eddy founded only in spiritual organization, having at each service to hear: “Now are we the sons of God.” No destructive materiality ever can be attributed to that, or to Mrs. Eddy’s founding of its ever Sunday facing.
The Sentinel in Sept. 1910 that carried Mrs. Eddy’s “clear, correct teaching”, My. 242, in several issues thereafter, carried the most, almost pitifully, grateful letters, at this release from this malicious claim that they yet are in the flesh, and assurance that heaven is our now, “that we are living in the spiritual world, not in one that is material.” By the way, if you want a marvelous statement of our now, look up Mr. Eustace’s article in the Aug. 1903 Journal, “Adam, Where Art Thou”. Also Mrs. Eddy’s Concord Corner-stone Address in the same issue. That issue of the Journal has definite significance or recording of Mrs. Eddy’s founding of “clear, correct teaching”. Remember always about the Journal as Mrs. Eddy stated it in the first issue of the Monitor in 1908, “designed to put on record the divine Science of Truth”, in other words of course, to put on record at least in that period, her founding. What a terrific eye-opener as record these Journals have been to me.
Now when Christian Scientists obey Mrs. Eddy, in the Manual, in all the founding, and so give up ecclesiasticism with its fearful and saddening jail of matter and materiality, you will see again that deep and almost pitiful gratitude for the glorious freedom of the sons of God, another fine quote in #30,–as these Sentinels in 1910 carry on the impact of Mrs. Eddy’s marvelous statement that “you declare yourself to be immortal and understand that you are so.” (My. 242). Two sentences I love from Mrs. Eddy. The first closes her Unity of Good, its final word, and without which good could not be one and all: “Mortals can never turn back what Deity knoweth, nor escape from identifications with what dwelleth in the eternal Mind.” (64); and in SCIENCE AND HEALTH, what forever puts one and all in his place, conceit and fear: “Existence, separate from divinity, Science explains as impossible.” Oh fatuous ecclesiasticism! at one with sin and sinner, neither real nor here nor now.
I know you will enjoy these founding facts, and know it is an especial pleasure to send them, for I know how faithfully you have sacrificed with all your “extra” PR work. Is this Times’ editorial about your Committee work? I would greatly like to see that letter about “Stetson”, as that must be handled in the full final impersonal founding.
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I was hoping to end this letter without another page for it is pretty long, and especially for a busy working woman. But I think I better say a word about Stetson in the founding. … We must not forget that Mrs. Eddy used almost forty-five years, all in one continuous, “seamless” whole, and the world’s greatest and most tireless worker, no move wasted and all counting in the one whole. In short, she has left a monument of achieved founding for Christian Scientists to digest and understand.
You were kind enough to say she often referred to her work here. But in the three evenings you doubtless got a fair idea of how Christian Science was looking to her at this first stage of her American safari. It is impossible to discuss founding of institution without founding of the word, and in particular the negation as evil, Mrs. Eddy’s forever problem with Christian Scientists from Richard Kennedy in 1872 right on, the ignorance of malicious mental malpractice, the key to get one’s world and universe into the kingdom of Mind, and all evil out. The conviction and the way of translation, All light and no darkness.
So we got into the founding in it oneness of word and institution. Mrs. Eddy has two more grand statements to the heart of this: “Evil is neither quality nor quantity: it is not intelligence, a person or a principle, a man or a woman, a place or a thing, and God never made it.” (Mess. ‘01.12-13); “Our only departure from ecclesiasticism on this subject is, that our faith takes hold of the fact that evil cannot be made so real as to frighten us, and so master us, or to make us love it and so hinder our way to holiness.” (p. 14); “It is Truth’s knowledge of its own infinite which forbids the genuine existence of even a claim to error. This knowledge is light wherein there is no darkness,–not light holding darkness within itself. The consciousness of light is like the eternal law of God, revealing Him and nothing else.” (No. 30); and finally: “Religions in general admit that man becomes finally spiritual. If such is man’s ultimate, his predicate tending thereto is correct, and inevitably spiritual. Wherefore, then, smite the reformer who finds the more spiritual way, shortens the distance, discharges burdensome baggage, and increases the speed of mortals’ transit from matter to Spirit-yea, from sin to holiness? This is indeed our sole proof that Christ, Truth, is the way.” (Mess. ‘02.10).
Thus once again Mrs. Eddy, as in all her founding brings us to THE WAY, and the only way, she ever trod or founded, and indeed does shorten the distance and increase the speed in knowing what is, our present now and heritage of heaven, as Mrs. Eddy so closes her Mother Church dedication in definition, our spiritual Mother church.
Now about Stetson in the founding. You know in all this, personality never counts-if it does you miss the founding-; Mrs. Eddy’s word is the one word that counts, and her action is the founding. Thus you watch only that, and you watch and find all others only in relation to that. Just how does the other relate each time to Mrs. Eddy’s particular important founding step? To get off on person or personality at all, is to sink sight of the real founding. And there is only one founding and that the real one. I have yet to trace through Mrs. Stetson’s full relation to Mrs. Eddy’s great forward moves. Remember, this is the only possible way you can ever understand all the others in this glorious and immortal founding of Christian Science.
But I can give you two main examples with Mrs. Stetson in this light.
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You know of course what Mrs. Eddy’s great step at the turn of 1898 was, setting up the Publishing Society ’98 Deed for throttling of personality and ecclesiasticism in Boston, what Mrs. Eddy described as “the demon scheme” when she sent that Deed first to its Trustees; and also preparing to unloose the lecturing, the teaching, and the general publicity supervision, as her special Mother Church activities, to bring the self-governing, unfettered local churches to world founding and practice. Especially to purify the field for this step, that it would hold this activity spiritually instead of materially, as in “whatever the material senses behold”, (S&H. 585), and if possible be ready for the again Mother Church material dissolving, Mrs. Eddy forbid all field teaching for one year from March, 1897 on. All were directed to study her books only for their teaching, thus giving for this purification this maximum blow to personality as person.
Now, where do we find Mrs. Stetson at this spiritually momentous founding hour? Mrs. Stetson brought forth in the 7th or Revised Edition (1897) of the Manual, this By-law, Sec. 6, p. 19, including in part: “no Church of Christ, Scientist, shall be considered loyal that has branches, or adopts the Mother Church’s form of government.” That all would understand why this By-law, in the opening page of the January, 1898 Journal, Mrs. Eddy runs the letter, dated Dec. 10, 1897, now in My. 243, in part saying: “According to reports, the belief is springing up in your midst, (this is the Journal language) that the several churches in New York City should come together and form one Church! This is a suggestion of error that should be silenced at its inception…I have not yet had the privilege of knowing two students that are adequate to take charge of three or more churches.” Stetson of course was the belief of dominating NYC, as the $2,000,000 church she soon was to build indicates. If you want to see the state of thought this church of Stetson was to Mrs. Eddy, see her dedicatory letter to it in her chapter for this purpose, Mrs. Eddy’s defining of the church qualities of thought. Here Mrs. Eddy uncovers or reverses, in part: “The letter of your work dies, as do all things material…Remember that a temple but foreshadows the idea of God…Only those men and women gain greatness who gain themselves in a complete subordination of self.” (My. 194).
If you think Mrs. Eddy could not discern and write otherwise in her dedication or analysis of branch thought, look first at the opening one, Edward A. Kimball’s dedication in Chicago, put first though not first in point of time; then especially look at the San Jose church, p. 197: “the translucent atmosphere of the former must illumine the midnight of the latter, else Christian Science will disappear from among mortals.” There you see, you are looking at one of Mrs. Eddy’s most amazing prophecies! Right down to 1948. What Mrs. Eddy wrote, intended for Mrs. Stetson, that she had yet to see “two students who are adequate to take charge of three or more churches”, each director should paste and carry in his or her hat. But they have been only figureheads in the mesmeric belief of the field. The field put over with the Court that supremacy claim, and it will disappear when they reject it. Direction by malicious minds as malicious mental malpractice put it over on all of them, in the negative interpretation of God’s direction.
As Mrs. Eddy at the end of 1897 was just starting to move the churches to impersonal, world, self-governing, individual founding, you see Mrs. Stetson trying to reverse this true individual church. In 1909 as you know, Mrs. Eddy had approximately concluded her world founding of the churches. The First Church and My. Is the record of Mrs. Eddy’s lifting of these churches to world founding, just as Mis. is the record of the founding of the Mother Church spiritual understanding that was to lift Christian Science to world founding. On Aug. 21, 1909, Mrs. Eddy sealed her My. papers, to be opened and printed only after her passing. Mrs. Eddy’s chapter, 8, on branch dedications, shows that on June 26, 1909 she had concluded, with this First Church of London as embracing the English speaking-peoples in the world founding. Mrs. Eddy was now facing her sublime task and problem of somehow withdrawing her personality from the belief of Christian Scientists in Christian Science. The Leader must be found wholly in her word as the God-crowned woman. Mrs. Eddy was now moving to her highest act in impersonality, just as Jesus at his similar period moved to his highest demonstration. At this point, Mrs. Stetson moved apparently with direct, deadly malicious malpractice, to personify herself to her students, and to cling personally to Mrs. Eddy as Leader. 1898 and 1909 were both direct negations by Mrs. Stetson of Mrs. Eddy’s direct-moving, which of course only helped her move rightly. Sincerely, Joseph E. Johnston
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