Article October 19, 1899 Issue

In Defence of Christian Science

E. R. Hardy

Buffalo (N. Y.) Express

To the Honorable Board of Aldermen.

Gentlemen:— You are asked by our city's Health Commissioner to pass an ordinance compelling all "healers" to report certain diseases to him. He has publicly confessed before your Ordinance Committee that his purpose in seeking this legislation was to compel Christian Scientists to conform to prevailing medical methods. This question of medical censorship may seem a very small matter to you, but it involves a very great question with us. We do not question the methods of our Board of Health so far as applied to the practice of medicine. We do object to having medical methods applied to the Christ method of healing all manner of diseases. Just so long as the plagues to which flesh is heir remain obscured by reason of ignorance of the mental condition that always precedes the physical occasion, just so long will plague germs be prevalent and boards of health necessary to restrain the careless, warn the fearful, and protect the public from their spread. All diseases are more or less communicable. Our daily news-papers offer ready vehicles for the mental contagion to communicate itself in what they mirror of the world's evils. Disease and sin are one in nature. Disease is no more communicable to us or from us than is sin, when we understand the laws of metaphysics and apply them to rendering it powerless. The Bible teaches the Christian Scientist that our Master came and taught us the mastery of good over evil; that we are neither to fear evil nor believe in its power over us, but to cast evil out of ourselves and others born in its moral and physical aspects—to become their masters through spiritual consciousness and not remain their servants. He said to all true disciples, to you and to me : "Behold, I give unto you power . . . over all the power of the enemy : and nothing shall by any means hurt you." Do you not believe it possible that his words can be proven true?

You all know that some vices are more readily communicable than others. It is the same with some diseases. Christian Scientists are not ignorant of the fact that the public needs protection and should have it. What we claim is this : A restrictive health ordinance is to physics precisely what the Mosaic law is to morals, viz., a negative preventive against the development of many evils. Experience shows us that a non-restrictive obedience to the rules of Christian Science or divine metaphysics fulfils the whole law — the law of good morals, the law of good health, and the law of good ethics; and this, too, without making public property of the patient's particular sin by which he has fallen or the special disease by which he has fallen into sickness. Our system of healing the sick and reforming the sinner, while wholly based upon Scriptural authority, is not to-day generally understood, but the time is very near when it will be better known and universally recognized and respected. If as a system of healing it finds opponents, this is because, like homoeopathy, the invisibility of the mental potency hardens the hearts of some while healing others into rest and peace.

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