Article August 20, 1910 Issue

There is one fact with respect to the Christian Science...

Frederick Dixon

Shrewsbury (Eng.) Commercial and Literary Circular

There is one fact with respect to the Christian Science movement which no reasonable person has ever been known to question. It is that it is always gathering force with the most amazing persistency, and yet without the aid of any of those proselytizing methods which for centuries have been regarded as inseparable from a successful religious propaganda. Fourteen years ago the entire "outward visible sign" of the movement in the United Kingdom could have been discovered in a tiny meeting of some half score of persons in a little west–end London flat. Today that meeting has not only burst its original confines, it has gathered such momentum that the teaching which inspired it has permeated the religious and social life of the whole kingdom, and is flowing with the placid force of some great river through the whole empire.

Now let any one turn back to the New Testament records of the first century, and he will find that the methods of the Founder of Christianity and of the apostles are the very methods which, after a lapse of all these centuries, are being again employed in the preaching of "Christ crucified," in the practice of Christian Science. When Jesus sent out the earliest Christian missionaries, he summed up his instructions to them in two phrases so simple and so direct as to be beyond human ingenuity to pervert. "Preach," he bade them, "saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand;" and then he added, "Heal the sick." In those words he constituted Christianity a Science for all time, inasmuch as he made a demand not for a mere intellectual assent to a theory, but for consistent demonstration of the truth of that theory. If God is omnipotent, then good is omnipotent, for God is good; and if good is omnipotent, then the goodness of God can be demonstrated today as it was in the first century.

Calling God good, and standing helpless in the presence of evil, is what the man known to us as the brother of the Lord, who wrote the epistle of James, describes as "faith without works," a sentence which gains a terrific emphasis when it is remembered that Jesus pointed the disciples of the Baptist, who came to question him as to his claim to the Messiahship, to the works of physical healing he was daily accomplishing. It was Jesus the Christ who demonstrated the power of the Christ to heal all manner of sin and suffering in the first century; it was Jesus the Christ who declared that all people, irrespective of time and place, who believed in the Christ, would be able to repeat his works, and to do even greater works; and so Paul could urge no stronger claim on the church at Philippi than to "let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus."

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