Article July 7, 1917 Issue

In an interesting report of an address on Christian Science...

Charles W. J. Tennant

Tonbridge (England) Free Press

In an interesting report of an address on Christian Science we are glad to see a clergyman dealing with this subject in a fair, open minded way; we are glad he has recognized "the immense amount of good in its teaching." A closer study of Mrs. Eddy's works will reveal that she really lays much more stress on the overcoming of sin than of sickness. On page 2 of "Rudimental Divine Science" she writes: "Healing physical sickness is the smallest part of Christian Science. It is only the bugle-call to thought and action, in the higher range of infinite goodness. The emphatic purpose of Christian Science is the healing of sin; and this task, sometimes, may be harder than the cure of disease; because, while mortals love to sin, they do not love to be sick."

While delivering his address the clergyman asked: "If God is All-in-all, whence and how came mortal mind and its delusion of disease, sin, evil, death?" On page 465 of Science and Health God is defined as "incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love." From this it follows that man and the universe, as the expression of God, must be spiritual, like producing like. This fact is revealed to the human consciousness by the Holy Spirit, the "Spirit of truth" spoken of by Jesus, which will lead into all truth. Now the Greek word for sin means "not shooting straight, to miss the mark," so that, since God is infinite, All-in-all, to believe in anything apart from God is to sin, or to miss the mark. It is a mistake, just as much as it is to believe that two and two make five.

In mathematics one knows that the belief that two and two make five is not a reality; yet it has to be reckoned with occasionally and corrected in human experience by the understanding of the principle governing the conversation of numbers. In precisely the same way, while sin and disease are no part of God or His perfect creation and are therefore unreal, they have to be dealt with in human experience and overcome by a spiritual understanding of the eternal facts of being. Our Master has given us a definition of evil in the words, "He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it." Nevertheless he invariably proved the unreality of evil by overcoming it in every form.

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