apprehension of the age.

I wrote also, at this period, comments on the Scriptures, setting forth
their spiritual interpretation, the Science of the Bible, and so laid the
foundation of my work called Science and Health, published in 1875.

If these notes and comments, which have never been read by any one but
myself, were published, it would show that after my discovery of the
absolute Science of Mind-healing, like all great truths, this spiritual
Science developed itself to me until Science and Health was written. These
early comments are valuable to me as waymarks of progress, which I would
not have effaced.

Up to that time I had not fully voiced my discovery. Naturally, my first
jottings were but efforts to express in feeble diction Truth's ultimate. In
Longfellow's language,--

But the feeble hands and helpless,
Groping blindly in the darkness,
Touch God's right hand in that darkness,
And are lifted up and strengthened.

As sweet music ripples in one's first thoughts of it like the brooklet in
its meandering midst pebbles and rocks, before the mind can duly express it
to the ear,--so the harmony of divine Science first broke upon my sense,
before gathering experience and confidence to articulate it. Its natural
manifestation is beautiful and euphonious, but its written expression
increases in power and perfection under the guidance of the great Master.

The divine hand led me into a new world of light and Life, a fresh
universe--old to God, but new to His "little one." It became evident that
the divine Mind alone must answer, and be found as the Life, or Principle,
of all being; and that one must acquaint himself with God, if he would be
at peace. He must be ours practically, guiding our every thought and
action; else we cannot understand the omnipresence of good sufficiently to
demonstrate, even in part, the Science of the perfect Mind and divine
healing.

I had learned that thought must be spiritualized, in order to apprehend
Spirit. It must become honest, unselfish, and pure, in order to have the
least understanding of God in divine Science. The first must become last.
Our reliance upon material things must be transferred to a perception of
and dependence on spiritual things. For Spirit to be supreme in
demonstration, it must be supreme in our affections, and we must be clad
with divine power. Purity, self-renunciation, faith, and understanding must
reduce all things real to their own me