of the Christian Science Movement, was of American birth, perhaps little is as yet generally known, nor is it possible within the scope of this volume to make more than the briefest references to a life which in itself is a story of vital human interest and spiritual import. For the moment we would simply ask for our readers' ready understanding of the possibility that a land like America, the new hope of a new world, a land of freedom and promise, of self-reliance, and spiritual inquiry, a land from whose soil sprang such characters as Washington and Lincoln, should during the lifetime of the latter have also cradled a woman whose moral and intellectual qualities were of the highest order, and whose spiritual insight and intuition certainly placed her among the world's religious seers, and constituted her "a leader among men." She loved knowledge for its own sake, eagerly drinking in all she could learn in every department of thought. She yearned most of all, however, for the deep things of God. The experiences of life as they came to her seemed but one long preparation for the later spiritual revelation. Always the demand was for greater self-sacrifice, greater forgiveness, less trust in the human, greater reliance on God, more hope, more truth-seeking, more compassion, deeper, stronger and more enduring love, and to these demands she never failed to respond. Would not the best in us all respond with love to such an one if presently she were found walking down the highways of our common life? Should we not readily believe that if the Holy Spirit had a message for a sinladen and suffering world, it would whisper its sacred utterances into such a pure and listening mind? We are not compelled to rely on tradition and fragmentary comments of century-old historians for the facts of her early pilgrimage. They are blazed in the full noonday light of Victorian biography, for all who seek them at their authentic sources, and are fully attested by those who lived and worked at her side, and is it not legitimate to expect and assume that the mother-love of a world which has struggled with sin and death for centuries, in speechless endeavour and nameless victories, should at last culminate in a woman who at the high tide of world progress should give birth to a spiritual idea, a further spiritual revelation of the nature and power of God? Edgar Quinet the French philosopher and poet, surely felt the vision of a clearer knowledge stir within his heart when he wrote as if in prophetic prayer,-"We live in the thought of what ought to be and what will be. The conscience of the human race is forming itself. Its ideals are passing away from being many and merely national, they tend to become one and that one universal. The leader in this great work will be the poet of the future. He will have to be the Mediator of the coming peoples. His word will belong exclusively to none. He is already the legislator of the Great European Confederation that is to be, yet he will as ever demand faith, and that faith will have to be strained to the uttermost. The Columbus of the new ideal world, he goes forth alone upon the ocean of thought; onward he sails, only to find the infinite ever increasing, still he pursues his way though what seemed land, prove cloud, what hope, mere illusion. To the popular cry 'Let us turn back' he will only answer "Tomorrow!' and tomorrow will prove an age. Tempest-tossed he may be, but he will not furl his sail until he has touched that shore where life has its source and which is called eternity." Would Quinet have felt astonishment had he known that the new Columbus was destined to be a woman? Yet why not? Had we not missed something hitherto in divine revelation inasmuch as the Saviour's teaching had not yet been expressed through the medium of a woman's intuition, her spiritual understanding, and this despite the fact that it was to women our Lord gave some of his deepest spiritual teaching? We may not have thought of these things in this way perhaps. We may not have concerned ourselves very much as to what type of woman the Leader of the Christian Science Movement was. We may have formed an altogether erroneous mental picture, and it will perhaps be a matter of some surprise, some interest to discover that she was a gracious refined Christian lady, a patriotic citizen, a devoted friend, an inspired teacher, a sage, a seer, a prophetess, a "Mother in Israel." Today in the embrace of a great spiritual discovery we may find comfort and joy, and it will give us a more humble and receptive mind, to perceive that such men as Theophilus and Clement, Origen and Saint Augustine, Wycliffe and Luther, Wishart, Bunyan and Baxter, William Penn, Pastor Robinson and John Wesley, the great teachers at whose naming all Christendom glows, together with more modern religionists-like Edwards and Maurice, Robertson and Brooks, Kingsley, Drummond and a host of others; that all these reached out in their thought to that exposition of the Bible which finds its fuller, more perfect and helpful expression in the Christian Science teaching which is restoring to this age a lost element of Christian practice, namely, spiritual healing. "O hearts of love! O Souls that turn For they the mind of Christ discern |