Article April 25, 1901 Issue

The Lectures

with contributions from W. S. Rosebrough

Judge William G. Ewing of Chicago addressed an audience of more than one thousand people at the Grand Opera House yesterday afternoon (Sunday, March 31) on Christian Science. He spoke for an hour and thirty minutes and during that time it is safe to assert that there was not a moment when he did not have the undivided attention of his hearers. It was what might be fittingly termed a beautiful discourse, for it was beautiful: beautiful in its lofty thought; beautiful in its moral precepts and high Christian purpose, and beautiful in the earnest simplicity and impressive sincerity of the speaker, as well in its ornate rhetoric.

Judge Ewing did not speak from the standpoint of one who seeks to proselyte, but as one whose purpose is to enlighten. It was not an argument to persuade to belief in the principles he represented, so much as it was a plea for fairness and candor. He spoke in defence of principles which he showed were wronged in the popular conception, and he sought to remove these errors, in justice not only to his creed, but to the mind honestly misled by popular prejudice or error. He sought not to make converts, but to excite honest thought and to encourage candid inquiry into the principles of Christian Science, and to place it where he contended it belongs, in the category of Christian creeds; to offer it as his conviction of the truest exponent of the religion of Christ — the most perfect and most efficacious application of the doctrines which he taught on earth.

Judge Ewing spoke with such a deep sense of conviction, with such earnestness of faith and manifest sincerity as warmed the hearts of his hearers and won for him their sympathetic attention. There was not one among them who could help feeling that, if he did not hear the truth itself, he at least heard an honest man's honest conception of it.

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