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heroism plainly shows that theirs was infinitely more than a blind faith, or a willingness to lay down their lives for the Gospel. It was an actual knowledge of the laws of spiritual existence which attended their triumphant exit from the grim drama of life in the flesh, a knowledge which all the envy, hate, and rage of their persecutors could not impair.

When it is borne in mind that the great mass of people in those days, and women in particular, could neither read nor write, and had no means of recording their thoughts, instruction being for the most part oral, it is easy to understand that the tenets of Christianity were expressed more in spirit and exemplification than by letter and treatise. Being destroyed in such numbers and their children with them, the first early witnesses to the truth of the teachings of Christ Jesus could only bequeath their glorious examples to posterity, and had no means of leaving definite instructions as to how they attained a dominion over material conditions which no other body of people had ever attained. But fortunately for the light of the ages to come, in one important centre of Roman civilization, no less a spot than trading, teeming, academic, cosmopolitan Alexandria, a Christian school of theology was permitted to develop which survived the fury of persecutions long enough to preserve the thought and scholarship of two eminent exponents of Christianity, viz., Clement and Origen. The School of the Catechumens (as the young students of Christianity were called) stands unique and unrivalled in the history of the early church, and is of inestimable value to History. Not until the nineteenth century were its precious records investigated with any degree of concern, yet in them we find a clarity. of vision and an exposition of the faith of those hundreds

of early martyrs, which else had remained forever inarticulate.

This School, which in the words of the Rev. W. Fairweather "fairly harnessed secular science to the chariot of Christian apologetics" emerges from historical obscurity about A.D. 190. In those days Alexandria was already a university city of renown. There in the midst of its groves, its chestnut, fig, and palm trees, its parks, flowerbeds, arcades and statues, stood the Museum, as the University buildings were called-rich in picture galleries, lecture rooms, dining halls, etc., and there too in one huge wing, was the famous library founded by the father of Philadelphus, which held in the time of Seneca, even after the destruction of a considerable part of it in Cæsar's siege, four hundred thousand manuscripts! Its white roof glistened against the cerulean blue of the Eastern sky, and beyond it, bathing the pediments of noble buildings, lay the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean.

It was not in the Museum itself, however, but in a more humble abode in the neighbouring precincts, that this school of the despised sect of Christianity instructed disciples whose probable earthly fate would be to wear a martyr's crown. Its first recorded head was one Pantænus, but little is known concerning him. Clement, his successor, who was born in the reign of Severus about 193 A.D., in Athens, had travelled in quest of truth in Italy, Syria, and Asia Minor, until learning of the existence of Pantænus he came to Alexandria, and in Christianity found that which Greek philosophers had been unable to supply. For the first time we have in him a teacher who with the wealth of a liberal education conjoined the sweetness and winsomeness of that brotherly love which characterized Christian discipleship. He

could champion the new religion in an intellectual way for he had added knowledge and understanding to faith.

His three great books, the "Protreptikos," the "Paidagogos" and the "Stromateis" written respectively for the heathen, the catechumen, and the Christian gnostic, all bear witness to his fervour no less than to his knowledge. Generous and tolerant in his views and methods, he held that Christ alone represented the whole truth of life, and that in him all philosophers who were seeking for light became reconciled. "The way of truth" he wrote "is one. But into it as into a perennial river streams flow from all sides." His deep, genuine Christianity is at once recognized by his understanding of love. This trait alone would mark him as wholly above and beyond the followers of Plato or those of any other teacher except Christ Jesus. The spirit of Saint John surely breathes through passages like this from his "Miscellanies."

"God then, being good, is love, it is said, whose love worketh no ill to his neighbour, neither injuring nor revenging ever, but in a word doing good to all according to the image of God. Love is then 'the fulfilling of the law.'

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So, too, Love, apprehended and practised in its purest sense, was the key to Mrs. Eddy's teaching throughout her whole life. In Science and Health (page 113) she writes:

"The vital part, the heart and soul of Christian Science, is Love. Without this, the letter is but the dead body of Science, pulseless, cold, inanimate.".

Without a detailed study of the writings of Clement and those of Mrs. Eddy, it is difficult for the casual reader to feel the peculiar spiritual atmosphere pervading both. Clement has a clear, logical conception of God and of His modes of creative expression. They are as profound

and as simple as rules in mathematics, more so, because they are the rules of existence as God brought it about. He also has the spiritual benignity and enthusiasm that yearns over the heathen world, and longs to save it. Mrs. Eddy has this same wistful, tender longing to give out all she knows in order to help and save, and she too has the same clarity of thought entirely devoid of all mystery. Moreover their theology or doctrine is identical in fundamental points. It was the theology which obtained unquestioned in the years prior to the time when the Arian Controversy tore the Churches asunder with strange strife.

Read this exhortation to the heathen, and see how the risen Saviour possessed all Clement's thoughts; and how disharmony and death, this entire earthly concept of life, simply vanished away in the presence of divine Life and the immediate recognition of spiritual existence.

"Jesus exhorts men in this fashion. 'Hear ye myriad tribes, rather whoever among men are endowed with reason both barbarians and Greeks. . . . Come, come for I want, I want to impart to you this grace, bestowing on you the perfect boon of immortality; and I confer on you both the word and the knowledge of God, my complete self. . . . I desire to restore you according to the original model, that ye may become also like me. I anoint you with the unguent of faith, by which you throw off corruption, and show you the naked form of righteousness by which you ascend to God.

"Let us aspire, after what is good; let us become Godloving men, and obtain the greatest of all things which are incapable of being harmed-God and life. . . . Having learned that we are the most excellent of His possessions, let us commit ourselves to God, loving the Lord God and

regarding this as our business all our life long. And if what belongs to friends be reckoned common property, and man be the friend of God-for through the mediation of the word has he been made the friend of God-then accordingly all things become man's, because all things are God's and the common property of both the friends, God and man. It is time then for us to say that the pious Christian alone is rich and wise, and of noble birth, and thus call and believe him to be God's image, and also His likeness, having become righteous and holy and wise by Jesus Christ and so far already like God. Accordingly this grace is indicated by the prophet when he says, 'I said that ye are gods, and all sons of the Highest' (Psalm 82: 6). For us, yea us, He has adopted and wishes to be called the Father of us alone, not of the unbelieving. Such is then our position who are the attendants of Christ." Turning now to Mrs. Eddy's writings, note the striking parallelism of thought:

"Glory be to God, and peace to the struggling hearts! Christ hath rolled away the stone from the door of human hope and faith, and through the revelation and demonstration of life in God, hath elevated them to possible at-one-ment with the spiritual idea of man and his divine Principle, Love." (Science and Health, p. 45.)

"Through divine Science man gains the power to become the son of God, to recognise his perfect and eternal estate. . . . Man is God's image and likeness; whatever is possible God's reflection. .

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to God, is possible to man as

The Science of being gives

back the lost likeness and power of God as the seal of man's adoption."

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