CUL:What Christmas means to Mary Baker Eddy

   (from the Christian Science Monitor, Friday, December 23, 1988)

   "Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of this newspaper, shared these
thoughts in the Ladies' Home Journal in 1907.

   "To me Christmas involves an open secret, understaood by few - or by
now - and unutterable except in Christian Science. Christ was not born
of the flesh. Christ is the Truth and Life born of God - born of Spirit
and not of matter. Jesus, the Galilean Prophet, was born of the Virgin
Mary's spiritual thoughts of Life and its manifestation."

   {Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that
Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that
confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God:
and this is that [spirit] of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that is
should come; and even now already is it in the world. 1 John 4:3-4}

   "God creates man perfect and eternal in His own image. Hence man is
the image, idea, or likness of perfection - an ideal which cannot fall
from its inherent unity with divine Love, from its spotless purity and
original perfection."

   "Observed by material sense, Christmas commerorates the birth of a
human, material mortal babe - a babe born in a manger amidst the flocks
and herds of a Jewish village."

   "This homely origin of the babe Jesus falls far short of my sense of
the eternal Christ, Truth, never born and never dying. I celebrate
Christmas with my soul, my spiritual sense, and so commerorate the
entrance into human understanding of Christ conceived of Spirit, of God
and not of a woman - as the birth of Truth, the dawn of divine Love
breaking upon the gloom of matter and evil with the glory of infinite
being."

   "Human doctrines or hypotheses of vague human philosophy afford
little divine effulgence, deific presence or power. Christmas to me is
the reminder of God's greatest gift - His spiritual idea, man and the
universe, a gift which so transcends mortal, material, sensual giving
that the merriment, mad ambition, rivalry, and ritual of our common
Christmas seem a human mockery in mimiery of the real worship in
commeroration of Christi's coming."

   "I love to observe Christmas in quietude, humility, benevolence,
charity, letting good will towards man, eloquent silence; prayer, and
praise express my conception of Truth's appearing.

   "The splendor of this nativity of Christ reveals infinite meanings
and gives manifold blessings. Material gifts and pastimes tend to
obliterate the spiritual idea in consciousness, leaving one alone and
without His glory."