Article March 26, 1910 Issue

The critics of Christian Science are apt to speak in a...

William J. Bonnin

Manchester (Eng.) Chronicle

The critics of Christian Science are apt to speak in a somewhat proprietary tone about "true religion" and "orthodox Christianity," for all the world as though such terms had some definite and accepted meaning, and did not constitute a begging of the whole question at issue. Thus a clerical critic, in his article in the World, from which extracts were printed last week, writes blandly of the superstitions to which men become victims "when once they reject true religion." When one bears in mind that, according to accepted authority on historic Christianity, the earlier and purer Christianity was gradually abandoned in the third century, when, in the words of Professor Harnack, the living faith was transformed into a creed to be believed, and devotion to Christ into Christology, with the resultant inability to demonstrate those signs promised to follow the true believer, then this statement of the reverend gentleman is seen to concern any form of Christianity rather than that primitive Christianity which Christian Science has set out to restore.

Most assuredly Christian Science in its teaching differs in many respects from that of other churches, but is there no demand for some fundamental recasting of our interpretation of the teaching of Jesus and the apostles? Do not the armies and navies of the world, its hospitals and gaols, its slums and its workhouses, argue eloquently that the Christianity of today falls short of the ideals of its Founder? Moreover, it is just by virtue of that difference that Christian Science is enabled to achieve its work of healing the sick, the sinning, and the suffering. Our critic says that among the truths of fundamental importance Christian Science insists upon, is the spiritual view of man and the world. But he adds that its protest against the materialistic view "of course goes too far in the opposite extreme." How this can be possible does not appear. If the spiritual view be the true view, the material must be the false, and it is hard to see how one can go "too far" in the direction of attaining to the true view. To believe that there is reality or truth in both views is to attempt to serve God and mammon—the fatal dualism that Christian Science comes to destroy.

The jumble of short statements given out by this critic as Mrs. Eddy's pronouncements on certain Christian doctrines is entirely misleading, and as unfair a method of criticism as could be adopted. That Mrs. Eddy has ever said that "Jesus was a mere healer of the sick" is pure invention. This critic speaks of another truth of fundamental importance in Christian Science, the immense power of the soul to influence the body, "though how far this power extends is not yet fully known." At the same time he refers to Christian Scientists as dupes and Christian Science as nonsense, in connection with this very subject. Now Christian Science has not only definitely and lucidly expounded this subject, but it has also been responsible for the ever-increasing amount of thought that is being given to it throughout the world.

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