Jesus of Nazareth was a natural and divine Scientist. He was so before the
material world saw him. He who antedated Abraham, and gave the world a new
date in the Christian era, was a Christian Scientist, who needed no
discovery of the Science of being in order to rebuke the evidence. To one
"born of the flesh," however, divine Science must be a discovery. Woman
must give it birth. It must be begotten of spirituality, since none but the
pure in heart can see God,--the Principle of all things pure; and none but
the "poor in spirit" could first state this Principle, could know yet more
of the nothingness of matter and the allness of Spirit, could utilize
Truth, and absolutely reduce the demonstration of being, in Science, to the
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,