made all perfect and eternal. Where then is the
necessity for recreation or procreation?" (p. 205).

"Above error's awful din, blackness, and chaos, the voice of Truth
still calls: 'Adam, where art thou? Consciousness, where art thou?
Art thou dwelling in the belief that mind is in matter, and that
evil is mind, or art thou in the living faith that there is and
can be but one God, and keeping His commandment?'" (pp. 307,
308). "Mortal mind inverts the true likeness, and confers animal
names and natures upon its own misconceptions. Ignorant of the
origin and operations of mortal mind,--that is, ignorant of
itself,--this so-called mind puts forth its own qualities, and
claims God as their author;... usurps the deific prerogatives and
is an attempted infringement on infinity" (pp. 512, 513).

We do not question the authenticity of the Scriptural narrative of the
Virgin-mother and Bethlehem babe, and the Messianic mission of Christ
Jesus; but in our time no Christian Scientist will give chimerical wings to
his imagination, or advance speculative theories as to the recurrence of
such events.

No person can take the individual place of the Virgin Mary. No person can
compass or fulfil the individual mission of Jesus of Nazareth. No person
can take the place of the author of Science and Health, the Discoverer and
Founder of Christian Science. Each individual must fill his own niche in
time and eternity.

The second appearing of Jesus is, unquestionably, the spiritual advent of
the advancing idea of God, as in Christian Science.

And the scientific ultimate of this God-idea must be, will be, forever
individual, incorporeal, and infinite, even the reflection, "image and
likeness," of the infinite God.

The right teacher of Christian Science lives the truth he teaches.
Preeminent among men, he virtually stands at the head of all sanitary,
civil, moral, and religious reform. Such a post of duty, unpierced by
vanity, exalts a mortal beyond human praise, or monuments which weigh
dust, and humbles him with the tax it raises on calamity to open the gates
of heaven. It is not the forager on others' wisdom that God thus crowns,
but he who is obedient to the divine command, "Render to Caesar the things
that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."

Great temptations beset an ignorant or an unprincipled mind-practice in
opposition to the straight and narrow path of Christi