SCIENTIFIC TRANSLATION - The Mary Baker Eddy Science Institute

Degree, or do we mean the divine-in-expression, like the ThirdDegree? Or something in between, such as the Second Degree?Many Christian Scientists have their fixed conception; some locatethe human firmly in the mortal, while others would place it in theSecond Degree. Yet the fact is that the textbook uses the termcarefully in all three categories, showing us thereby that the concepthas to be constantly translated from what it is not to what it truly is.Because 'the human' spans all three degrees of the secondtranslation, our apprehension of what it means is continually rising. Ifour sense of it is stuck in a certain opinion, it shuts the mind to whatthe textbook is actually saying about the human, and we are hinderedin our ability to demonstrate Christian Science. The mission ofChristian Science is to demonstrate that the human is the purereflection of the divine, that it is not mortality, and is thus “absolvedfrom death and the grave” (My 2 18:14). How can this be done unlessour conception of the human be translated? And how can the human,which is phenomenon, be translated unless we first understand itsnoumenon? There can be no solution to humanity's problems on apurely human basis.To this end Mrs. Eddy had to frame an educational system that wouldteach what God really is, - and therefore what man really is. It wasalso designed to spiritualize the student's thought, for as the studentis spiritually transformed, less and less is he a person outside,objectively approaching reality; more and more does he find himselfto be the very workings, - the experience, - of reality itself. TheScientific Translation of Immortal Mind” works in him as thecomplementary “Scientific Translation of Mortal Mind.” Thus he findsthat the educational system of Christian Science is not onlysystematic instruction in the absolute laws of being but is alsoexperiential, self-demonstrating, and permeating his life.The chapter “Science, Theology, Medicine,” where the translationtable is found, contains also the arresting statement, “Divinemetaphysics is now reduced to a system, to a form comprehensibleby and adapted to the thought of the age in which we live” (146:31).In her own thought the discovery that Mrs. Eddy denominatedChristian Science was clearly a system. By means of it God could beunderstood, and this understanding then became divine Mindhealing.The Science and system to which divine metaphysics is41