Four sentences, characterized by Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) as the “scientific statement of being,” describe the foundational principle from which can be said to flow all of “Christian Science”—as Mrs. Eddy named her 1866 “discovery,” elaborating it in the seminal book Science and Health (1875). The statement reads in part:
All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all.
Though presented as the keynote summary at the conclusion of each Christian Science Sunday church service worldwide for well over a century now, that statement is seldom fully recognized as presenting fundamental, universal law—scientific in every sense and as readily provable in anyone’s experience of living as is Einstein’s e=mc2 in astrophysics.
Margaret Laird (1885-1982) was one of the rare few who recognized Christian Science, not as religion in the traditional sense, but as pure science—identifying the oneness of all Being.
For many years an authorized Christian Science practitioner and teacher, she understood that: “All” means everything that exists or seems to exist; that “Mind” means, consciousness, the capacity to think, or awareness; and that “manifestation” means every facet of man/universe. She also understood that any expression of this Science might be parsed with God as subject, Man as verb and Universe as object—stating one complete, perfect unity that cannot be divided conceptually without loss of identity and function.
In Christian Science Re-Explored, first published in 1965, again in 1971 and just republished as a third edition with a comprehensive index, Laird examines the many facets of the view of Life-in-action revealed in Science.
She re-explores this Science as the lens through which the metaphysical nature of God/Man/universe is clearly and persistently brought to light and, in the process, further illuminates Mrs. Eddy’s description of Science as presenting the spiritual fact of whatever the material senses behold, thereby identifying the God-idea as the limitless Mind/Spirit constituting the substance and energy seen as Man/universe).
This re-exploration is every bit as exciting and challenging to conventional thinking as it sounds. For students of this Science, it presents revolutionary perspectives on Christian history, the Bible, theology and Mrs. Eddy’s ideas, with depth, breadth, clarity and precision.
For those to whom this Science is new, it offers a context of physics, psychology, atomic power, space exploration, medicine, environmental awareness and other considerations touched on only briefly, or not at all, by Mrs. Eddy.
It can awaken any reader to a potential for good far exceeding anything imagined in a world circumscribed by ordinary sensory experience.