Article February 25, 1911 Issue

Christian Science is, as a matter of fact, the effort to...

Frederick Dixon

London (Eng.) Sunday Times

Christian Science is, as a matter of fact, the effort to reestablish primitive Christianity, and primitive Christianity consisted not merely in preaching the gospel, but in healing the sick, and by healing the sick is understood, in Christian Science, not simply the overcoming of disease and pain, but the destruction of poverty and misery, of sorrow and sin,—in short, of all conditions which are inharmonious and so contrary to divine law. This law the Jews represented as largely the observance of ceremonies, and their view was summarily dismissed by Jesus in his simile of the outside of the platter. To him ceremonies were mere opportunities for losing sight of Principle. He expressed law in very different terms, in terms of persistent spiritual activity. To Jesus divine law was expressed not in the variability of an anthropomorphic God, dominated with the passions of His own creatures, but in the harmonious action of divine Principle, "with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."

Even the student of natural science demands as dignified a definition as this for law. Law, he declares, is that in which no variation ever occurs, and so law can only be defined as absolute Truth, since for absolute Truth alone can such a claim be made. Now, a knowledge of absolute Truth is without question the most scientific knowledge any man can ever hope to acquire, and this is undoubtedly why the writers of the epistles make use of a phrase rather unfortunately translated knowledge of God, but which should, of course, have been translated exact or scientific knowledge of God, and so of Truth.

This scientific knowledge is comprised in the word theology, which itself only means the word of God. The meaning of the word itself has, in the course of the centuries, become strained, just as a certain theological writer, speaking of the word atonement, calmly declares that its original meaning of at-one-ment, or unity, has been very properly deepened into a theological sense of expiation. The theology of Jesus was the simplest and most direct religious teaching ever known. It was absolutely devoid of dogma and was supported by demonstration, and so was entirely scientific. Some realization of this was no doubt present in the mind of the greatest of the medieval schoolmen when he described theology, in the summa, as the only absolute Science, dismissing all physical sciences as purely relative. The theology of the schoolmen was itself very far from being simple, and consisted largely in layers of Aristotelianism and chopped logic. Nevertheless, in writing this, Aquinas did perceive something which had been perceived by the apostle John, by Peter, and by Paul, and expressed by them in their writings; something which was made concrete, by a writer of our own times, in the words that either Christianity is scientific and Science is Christian, or that one or the other is unnecessary.

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