flowing tide, and yet her thoughts were to prove a light for the ages. Returning to her simple boarding-house, the only lodging she could then afford, she wrote down the inspirations which had come to her. Sometimes she spoke of "her book" to the common people about her, who for the most part were engaged in making shoes, and among whom, in her straitened circumstances, her lot seemed cast; but she spoke often to unheeding ears. They were not adverse to religion. These descendants of Puritan forefathers thought for themselves and expressed their opinions freely, but they wished for a theology they were accustomed to, and presented in a manner familiar to them.

Longfellow has truly spoken:

"The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,

But they, while their companions slept
Were toiling upward in the night."

These would

Her first disciples were little children. scramble over the rocks with her and knock eagerly at her door. As in Jesus' time, the child mind was the first to perceive the Kingdom of Heaven, and to think lovingly of this "anointed" messenger.

While we may glory in the fact that the truth of Christian Science began its healing ministry among the poor and lowly, among little children and common laborers, as it did with Wesley, and with the first and greatest Gospel Teacher nineteen centuries ago, it still seems strange that they alone should have been ready to listen to the healing Word; that the greater souls, the earnest and schooled Christians of this generation, men who have been deeply engrossed with the word Science, and who have been

striving to reconcile it with the word God, that they should not also have been led to the threshold of this great "spiritual light," this prophet of our day.

Kingsley died in January, 1875, at his home in Eversley, and that autumn Mrs. Eddy published by private subscription (since no publisher could be found to accept it) the first edition of the Christian Science text-book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.

CHAPTER XXVII

PIONEER AND CONTEMPORARY VOICES

Henry Drummond, Dr. Dorothy Blackwell, The Lady with the Lamp

T

HENRY DRUMMOND

WELVE years after the first printing of Science and
Health, Henry Drummond's book Natural Law

in the Spiritual World attained its seventy-second thousand and twenty-first edition. In the Preface are

found these lines:

"When we regard the uncertainty of current beliefs, the war of creeds, the havoc of inevitable as well as of idle doubt, the reluctant abandonment of early faith by those who would cherish it longer if they could, is it not plain that the one thing thinking men are waiting for is the introduction of Law among the phenomena of the spiritual world? When that comes we shall offer to such men a truly Scientific theology. And the reign of Law will transform the whole spiritual world as it has already transformed the natural world."

When a great light streams into human consciousness it sheds its radiance over a vast field of thought. In modern parlance the new idea is broadcasted, and those who are ready to receive it share in the discovery exactly in proportion to their mental receptivity. During that wondrous event which established the Christian Era, the Wise Men knew that a great ruler was born to the world because they saw "his star in the East." According to each man's

comprehension the blessing takes shape in progressive forms and activities. The old order of thought and custom is laid aside, and the truth is reborn.

Henry Drummond was one of these receptive souls whose mind was in tune with this new-old truth born again to the world in the coming of Christian Science; but the truth seemed to filter into his brain only through a side light, the suggestive disclosures and illuminations of natural phenomena. He did not with "open face behold as in a glass the glory of the Lord," but he experienced a great vision which caused him to become aware of a wholly new order of existence, a spiritual world in which Love as divine Principle, and Law as a synonym for Love, was the basis of existence. Robert Browning had already perceived this fact:

"I spoke as I saw

I report as a man may of God's work-all's

Love, yet all's Law."

In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy declares that:

"The visible universe and material man are the poor counterfeits of the invisible universe and spiritual man." (p. 337.)

But she also declares that:

"When examined in the light of divine Science, mortals present more than is detected upon the surface, since inverted thoughts and erroneous beliefs must be counterfeits of Truth. Thought is borrowed from a higher source than matter, and by reversal, errors serve as waymarks to the one Mind." (p. 267.) Drummond took his illustrations from the material, or "inverted" universe, nevertheless he was finding that