Article November 23, 1907 Issue

The letter of Mr. W. H. Y. Webber in your recent issue...

Frederick Dixon—Kingston, England.

Surrey Comet and South Middlesex News

The letter of Mr. W. H. Y. Webber in your recent issue on the subject of the acceptance of a copy of Science and Health for the free library would be more convincing if written with less heat and more accuracy. A gentleman who writes of Christian Scientists as people "who forbid their dupes even to enter any place of Christian worship, or attend Sunday School, or, for all I know, to read a book by which their eyes might be opened," is clearly not a person to decide whether Christian Science literature shall be accepted by a public library.

First, Christian Scientists do not forbid their members to enter other churches; second, they do not forbid their children to attend any Sunday School; third, they have no "index." Finally, it will not come with a peculiar shock to any of your readers to learn that Christian Scientists naturally attend their own churches, send their children to their own Sunday Schools, and prefer their own literature. If they did not, they would scarcely have become Christian Scientists.

This critic describes Christian Science as "blasphemous balderdash." but may I remind him that a great Englishman, the late Dean Stanley, a man, I am sure, quite the critic's equal as a Christian and a scholar, presented a copy of the text-book of this "blasphemous nonsense" to the Westminister library, inscribed in his own hand, and that it was chiefly through the interest of another great Englishman, the late Professor Huxley, that the British Museum obtained the first of its many copies? Science and Health is the book with the largest circulation of the present day, and the Library Committee are showing a wise and thoughtful spirit in adding it to the library.

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