Books by Mary Baker Eddy

EXTRACT FROM MY FIRST ADDRESS IN THE MOTHER CHURCH, MAY 26, 1895
page 58

EXTRACT FROM MY FIRST ADDRESS IN THE MOTHER CHURCH, MAY 26, 1895

   Friends and Brethren: - Your Sunday Lesson, composed
of Scripture and its correlative in "Science and
Health with Key to the Scriptures," has fed you. In addition,
I can only bring crumbs fallen from this table of
Truth, and gather up the fragments.
   It has long been a question of earnest import, How
shall mankind worship the most adorable, but most
unadored, - and where shall begin that praise that shall
never end? Beneath, above, beyond, methinks I hear
the soft, sweet sigh of angels answering, "So live, that
your lives attest your sincerity and resound His praise."
   Music is the harmony of being; but the music of Soul
affords the only strains that thrill the chords of feeling
and awaken the heart's harpstrings. Moved by mind,
your many-throated organ, in imitative tones of many

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instruments, praises Him; but even the sweetness and
beauty in and of this temple that praise Him, are earth's
accents, and must not be mistaken for the oracles of God.
Art must not prevail over Science. Christianity is not
superfluous. Its redemptive power is seen in sore trials,
self-denials, and crucifixions of the flesh. But these come
to the rescue of mortals, to admonish them, and plant
the feet steadfastly in Christ. As we rise above the seeming
mists of sense, we behold more clearly that all the
heart's homage belongs to God.
   More love is the great need of mankind. A pure affection,
concentric, forgetting self, forgiving wrongs and
forestalling them, should swell the lyre of human love.
   Three cardinal points must be gained before poor
humanity is regenerated and Christian Science is demonstrated:
(1) A proper sense of sin; (2) repentance;
(3) the understanding of good. Evil is a negation: it
never started with time, and it cannot keep pace with
eternity. Mortals' false senses pass through three states
and stages of human consciousness before yielding error.
The deluded sense must first be shown its falsity through
a knowledge of evil as evil, so-called. Without a sense
of one's oft-repeated violations of divine law, the individual
may become morally blind, and this deplorable
mental state is moral idiocy. The lack of seeing one's
deformed mentality, and of repentance therefor, deep,
never to be repented of, is retarding, and in certain morbid
instances stopping, the growth of Christian Scientists.
Without a knowledge of his sins, and repentance so severe
that it destroys them, no person is or can be a Christian
Scientist.
   Mankind thinks either too much or too little of sin.

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The sensitive, sorrowing saint thinks too much of it: the
sordid sinner, or the so-called Christian asleep, thinks too
little of sin.
To allow sin of any sort is anomalous in Christian
Scientists, claiming, as they do, that good is infinite, All.
Our Master, in his definition of Satan as a liar from the
beginning, attested the absolute powerlessness - yea,
nothingness - of evil: since a lie, being without foundation
in fact, is merely a falsity; spiritually, literally, it
is nothing.
Not to know that a false claim is false, is to be in danger
of believing it; hence the utility of knowing evil aright,
then reducing its claim to its proper denominator, -
nobody and nothing. Sin should be conceived of only
as a delusion. This true conception would remove mortals'
ignorance and its consequences, and advance the second

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