.]

[Footnote 48: Page 41.]

[Footnote 49: Page 44.]

"His disciples believed Jesus to be dead while He was hidden in the
sepulchre, whereas He was alive, demonstrating within the narrow tomb
the power of the spirit to overrule mortal, material sense." His
ascension was a final demonstration in which He "rose above the physical
knowledge of His disciples and the material senses saw Him no more." He
attained this perfection of demonstration only gradually and He left
behind Him an incomplete revelation which was to wait for its full
illumination for the coming of Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science. Perhaps
more justly He left behind Him, according to Mrs. Eddy and her
followers, a body of teaching which could not be clearly understood
until she came to complete the revelation. At any rate, Christian
Science is really His second coming.

_Christian Science His Second Coming_

In an advertisement printed in the New York _Tribune_ on January 23,
1921, Augusta E. Stetson says: "Christ in Christian Science is come to
the understanding of those who looked for His reappearing." And if
certain sentences which follow mean anything, they mean that, in the
thought of Mrs. Eddy's followers, she completes what Jesus began and
fulfills the prophecy of His reappearing. "Her earthly experience runs
parallel with that of her Master; understood in a small degree only by
the few who faintly see and accept the truth, she stood during her
earthly mission and now stands on the mount of spiritual illumination
toward whose heights no feet but those of the blessed Master have so
directly toiled, first in agony and finally, like Jesus Christ the
masculine representative of the Fatherhood of God, she as the feminine
representative of the motherhood of God, will appear in triumphant
demonstration of divine power and glory as the combined ideal man in
God's image and likeness."

And, indeed, there are not wanting intimations in "Science and Health"
which give to Mrs. Eddy a certainty in this region which Jesus Himself
did not possess. He falters where she firmly trod. No need to dwell
upon the significant omissions which such an interpretation of the
historic Jesus as this demands. The immensely laborious and painstaking
scholarship which has sought, perplexedly enough it must be confessed,
to discover behind the Gospel narratives the fundamental facts and
realities of His life, is entirely ignored. Mrs. Eddy has no place for
the social aspec