Article February 16, 1899 Issue

Reply to New York Sun

Edward A. Jenks

Concord, N. H.

To the Editor of The Sun.

Sir:—On December 30 you published a notable "attack" on Christian Science, signed by a Mr. Lawrence, notable chiefly for its intolerance, its nauseous epithets, its unfounded assumptions, and its ill-concealed anger at the rapid increase of the number of Mrs. Eddy's followers throughout the Christian world. In the time of Jesus and of John, the same disposition was rampant. "John came neither eating nor drinking," and the "Lawrences" said, "He hath a devil." Jesus came eating and drinking, and they said, "Behold a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber." Luke, "the beloved physician," who had ceased to practise the Old School methods of healing, and had become a Christian Scientist under the teachings of the Master, records that when the seventy returned with joy, saying, "Lord, even the devils are subject to us through thy name," Jesus rejoiced in spirit, saying, "I thank thee, O Father, ... that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent [the Lawrences], and hast revealed them unto babes"—his "ignorant" followers. But is your correspondent, after all, so learned that he can afford to hold in contempt those who may not be so highly educated as he? One would scarcely think it, judging from his contribution to the Sun. He asks, "How should she know the patient was suffering from a cancer?" Obviously, first, because Mrs. Eddy was a regularly educated Homoeopathic physician in her earlier days (and to-day the Homoeopathic and the Old School practitioners are lying peacefully in the same professional bed); and secondly, because the Old School physician who had the case in charge before she was called, and had given it up as absolutely incurable, said the disease was cancer. The "ignorant" and unlettered fishermen, in their accounts of healings by the Master and the Twelve and the Seventy, never hesitated to say, for the same reason, that they were palsied, or lepers, or withered, or blind, or dumb, or insane ("possessed of devils"), or dead. But wise Mr. Lawrence would ask, in scorn, How did those fellows know the diseases mentioned were the real thing? And when it comes to a question of faith, one could believe quite as readily that a genuine cancer was cured "at one sitting," as that a "tumor or a sloughing sore" could be cured at one sitting—either being impossible to the mind of Mr. Lawrence of Flushing. And he intimates, with a recklessly easy assurance that it is a pleasure to prick, that "a vast majority" of Christian Science cures are practically frauds; that "ninety-nine cases out of a hundred" are "as far from truth as the East is from the West." How far, pray, is the East from the West? Mr. Lawrence, with all his intelligence, is sublimely unconscious of the simple fact that the East and the West are as intimately and closely joined as were the Siamese twins, and so, of course, is equally oblivious of the inappositeness of his simile. So far as his bold statement as to the "ninety-nine cases out of a hundred" is concerned, I will venture the belief that he would not dare make it under oath.

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