plies such an elevation of the understanding as will enable
thought to apprehend the living beauty of Love, its practicality, its
divine energies, its health-giving and life-bestowing qualities,--yea, its
power to demonstrate immortality. This end Jesus achieved, both by example
and precept.
_Third_: This leads inevitably to a consideration of another part of
Christian Science work,--a part which concerns us intimately,--preaching
the gospel.
This evangelistic duty should not be so warped as to signify that we must
or may go, uninvited, to work in other vineyards than our own. One would,
or should, blush to enter unasked another's pulpit, and preach without the
consent of the stated occupant of that pulpit. The Lord's command means
this, that we should adopt the spirit of the Saviour's ministry, and abide
in such a spiritual attitude as will draw men unto us. Itinerancy should
not be allowed to clip the wings of divine Science. Mind demonstrates
omnipresence and omnipotence, but Mind revolves on a spiritual axis, and
its power is displayed and its presence felt in eternal stillness and
immovable Love. The divine potency of this spiritual mode of Mind, and the
hindrance opposed to it by material motion, is proven beyond a doubt in the
practice of Mind-healing.
In those days preaching and teaching were substantially one. There was no
church preaching, in the modern sense of the term. Men assembled in the one
temple (at Jerusalem) for sacrificial ceremonies, not for sermons. Into the
synagogues, scattered about in cities and villages, they went for
liturgical worship, and instruction in the Mosaic law. If one worshipper
preached to the others, he did so informally, and because he was bidden to
this privileged duty at that particular moment. It was the custom to pay
this hortatory compliment to a stranger, or to a member who had been away
from the neighborhood; as Jesus was once asked to exhort, when he had been
some time absent from Nazareth but once again entered the synagogue which
he had frequented in childhood.
Jesus' method was to instruct his own students; and he watched and guarded
them unto the end, even according to his promise, "Lo, I am with you
alway!" Nowhere in the four Gospels will Christian Scientists find any
precedent for employing another student to take charge of their students,
or for neglecting their own students, in order to enlarge their sphere of
action.
Above all, trespass not intentiona
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