Daily Watch for the week of July 2nd, – July 9th, 2023

From 500 Watching Points by Gilbert Carpenter

141 — WATCH lest you base your sense of Christian Science and worship of God upon the form from which the Spirit has fled. Traditional theology is a sense of worship based on Jesus without the Christ, or instead of the Christ. There is little difference between this error and an acceptance of Christian Science based on Mrs. Eddy as person, rather than as the Pastor Emeritus, or the impersonal spiritual idea which she embodied.

Once a statue of a woman kneeling in prayer was ordered, with Mrs. Eddy’s permission, for the extension of The Mother Church. It was put in place over the organ and remained there for three days. Then the Directors received a letter from Mrs. Eddy instructing them to remove it.

One of our hymns tells us that, as we rise, the symbols disappear. The three days the statue was in place are symbolic of the ascension of Mrs. Eddy’s thought, in which she realized that her personality must be replaced by the consciousness of her spiritual presence. She knew that Jesus had declared that, as the spiritual idea, he was present with us always; but that this spiritual presence, or Comforter, would not come unless the conception of him as a human person was taken away.

Mrs. Eddy realized that if the statue remained, students might descend to the attitude of worshipping it, as representing her personality, which would be a deterrent to the attainment of the understanding of her true mission, and of the concept which she desired students to hold for all time, as being most conducive to spiritual growth. The lazy mind takes the easier way. It prefers worshipping a statue to demonstrating the right concept and memory of the Leader.

We crucify the Christ afresh, whenever we descend to the worship of the form without the Spirit, or instead of the Spirit. Once Mrs. Eddy defined scholastic theology as the worship of personality. She said, “Christian Science theology is: reality of good and unreality of evil. Theologies are opinions of men about what Jesus did; also, about the teachings of the Scriptures and the prophets. In Science we understand all the teachings of Christ, which include all good and exclude all evil. And we can prove it.”

To The Watchers

from Watches, Prayers, and Arguments, as given by Mary Baker Eddy, page 49

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“Hear, O Israel, for the Lord, our God, is one God.”
You are not to come in your own name to pray.
You are not to control any mind.
You are to come only in the divine strength, and know that God will rule and does, and that hypnotism and evil minds cannot, and do not, control men or governments.
All power is God, good.
This is my only formula to Christian Scientists for prayer, and God will give you faith that will remove mountains.