Description
Verbatim Report by John W Doorly
John W. Doorly’s Christian Science Pupils’ Association Meeting,
Saturday, June l8th, 1938.
All that John Doorly shared with his pupils at this Meeting constituted a turning-point in the understanding of Christian Science. It was a clarion call for thought to cease regarding Christian Science mainly as a religion and advance to the discernment of what comprises the pure Science and system of this vast subject. All the seeds of the fundamental categories of this pure Science of being which later developed in their clarity and wholeness seem to have been planted here.
This Association address, given when John Doorly was still a Teacher in the Christian Science organization, speaks very dynamically and compellingly to the student, rousing him to open his thought to the pure Science of Christian Science and not be content with a limited, emotional sense of it and its ability just to heal and comfort human experience. John Doorly speaks of this as “approaching problems from the human … tilling the soil” and says, “all the time the destructive action of the human mind in the world today is so specific, so humanly scientific, that unless we oppose it with divine Science, we shall be lost.”
Published in 1990 this Report had never been made available to everyone before. Copies had only been loaned to the Association pupils. It is republished exactly as it appeared in 1938 merely with the addition of an explanatory “Foreword” and Mary Baker Eddy’s article “Principle and Practice” reproduced in full at the end.
A sincere student of Christian Science wrote, “The clarity with which John Doorly shows Mrs. Eddy’s scientific use for the synonymous terms for God, and indeed the whole scientific system as he sets it forth in that 1938 address was the breakthrough I needed.”
