Article April 11, 1901 Issue

Christian Science Candidly Considered

WHENEVER an idea is advanced that is not in harmony with the popular notion of the time, there is a general tendency to fight against it. This is not a peculiarity of the present age but has been true in all times past. As far back as history goes we find that those who proposed anything new were fought bitterly by a majority of the people. It was less than three hundred years ago that Galileo advanced the idea that the world was round, and moved while the sun remained in a fixed position. For this he was tried and convicted as a heretic. It was about the same time that Harvey advanced the theory of the circulation of the blood. He was bitterly opposed not only by the general public but by the leading scientists. The year that Galileo died, there was born another original thinker, Newton. His discovery of the law of gravitation was not accepted without strong opposition.

But to come down to our own time, we all know the ridicule that was heaped upon the head of the man who proposed to draw cars with an engine. It is told of a school board in this state that when some young men wanted the schoolhouse for the purpose of having a discussion on the subject, that one of the directors said that they might have the schoolhouse for any reasonable discussion, but not to talk about such an unreasonable idea as a railroad. "Why," he said, "if God had ever intended that people should ever travel at such a frightful speed (fifteen miles an hour) it would have been prophesied in the Bible." This man was no doubt sincere in his belief that railroads were "a device of the devil," as he called them; but now, to the present generation, he appears to have been a very silly old man.

We might go on at great length citing cases of opposition to what has since been adopted as correct, but these few instances will be enough to show that an idea is not necessarily foolish because it is new. In order to consider candidly any subject it is first necessary to lay aside our prejudice as far as possible, and in this consideration of the subject of Christian Science the idea is to be fair, regardless of preconceived notions and prejudices. A belief, or religion, or theory, or whatever it may be termed, that is accepted by over half a million persons, who have established five hundred churches, is not to be dismissed with a sneer or declared to be absurd. The time may come when sneerers will be looked upon as we view the old man who thought that God never intended that people should travel at the rate of fifteen miles an hour.

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