Article July 27, 1899 Issue

Christian Science

BY AN INVESTIGATOR.

Dayton (Ohio) Herald

Prejudice , religious or political, is always condemned—still nothing flourishes so well.

Would you consider yourself a competent critic on Chinese literature without having studied it? Would you speak on Egyptian hieroglyphics, on Assyrian classics if unfamiliar with the language of those people? No. Yet people who have never read the text-book of Christian Science, Science and Health, by Mary Baker G. Eddy, which has now passed the one hundred and sixty-first edition of one thousand copies each, condemn it. This is bigotry. What right have you to pass judgment upon a belief, the people who believe it, and their aspirations without having studied and read their principles? Yet a proportion of public opinion seems to do this very thing. There is no religious denomination on the face of the globe which within a few years has spread so rapidly as the Christian Science movement. Many of the followers are highly cultured and representative people of the American nation. Christianity, pure and undefiled, is presented in that famous text-book, Science and Health. One of the signal characteristics of this Spiritual Science is healing by God; the Omnipotent Mind, sublimely potent as a curative factor, when compared with a drug, alterative, powder, or pill. Is not this true? Do we not hear it today voiced from the lips of leading university professors, that the mind governs the body? What does the Bible declare on this subject? "As a man thinketh in his heart [mind], so is he." The body is moulded and fashioned by the thought. All is mind. The body does not move if the mind does not direct it. The body, no more than any inert matter, can give expression to any emotion, suffering or rejoicing, unless the mind behind it as the motive power, directs and demonstrates it. Jealousy is always mental. Hatred is mental, and you know and see how these phenomena disfigure the features and turn an angelic countenance into that of a fiend.

Plant a strong thought in one's mind, mature it from day to day, and it becomes a reality, a tangible living presence. You remember the oft-repeated story told of Lord Byron. While a boy he was warned by a fortuneteller that he would die in the thirty-seventh year of his age. That idea haunted, that thought pursued him through his life, until it became impressed upon his belief as a reality, and in his last illness he mentioned it to the anxious watchers by his bedside as precluding all hope of his recovery. His physicians said that it repressed the energy of spirit so "necessary for nature in struggling with disease." Think of this as a concession from the medical profession!

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