PREFACE.


This volume contains scintillations from press and pulpit--utterances
which epitomize the story of the birth of Christian Science, in 1866,
and its progress during the ensuing thirty years. Three quarters of a
century hence, when the children of to-day are the elders of the
twentieth century, it will be interesting to have not only a record of
the inclination given their own thoughts in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, but also a registry of the rise of the mercury in
the glass of the world's opinion.

It will then be instructive to turn backward the telescope of that
advanced age, with its lenses of more spiritual mentality, indicating
the gain of intellectual momentum, on the early footsteps of Christian
Science as planted in the pathway of this generation; to note the
impetus thereby given to Christianity; to con the facts surrounding the
cradle of this grand verity--that the sick are healed and sinners saved,
not by matter, but by Mind; and to further scan the features of the vast
problem of eternal life, as expressed in the absolute power of Truth,
and the actual bliss of man's existence in Science.

MARY BAKER EDDY.

February, 1895.