Article September 4, 1902 Issue

An Appeal for Fair Judgment

We are permitted to use the following letter from a Christian Scientist to a member of his family:—

Dear Brother:— I regret that you still feel impelled to speak in such condemnatory terms of Christian Science. Your concept of it certainly merits no tolerance, but this concept is a distortion of the truth and it indicates that you have not profited by all your opportunities to know the facts. Your information has evidently been gathered for the most part from its detractors, and your judgment of it is formed, I should say, from hearsay, from the observation of it, and who, evidently, are not fair representatives of it, and from a prejudice which, I think, is fully as vigorous as was mine. The formation and maintenance of an opinion on such a basis is injudicial, brother, and no less discreditable to you, as a Christian minister, than it was to me, during the years of my pronounced antagonism to this movement. In a kindred way Christianity has always been subject to the caricature and contempt of those who were in many respects very good men. Marcus Aurelius was one of them and Ingersoll another, and the intervening number has been legion. They all made the mistake which you and I have repeated after nineteen centuries of history.

Over against the dozen "queer ones you name, who may have made themselves ridiculous, as well as the Cause which they perhaps sincerely meant to honor, I could easily find you twelve thousand and more, wholesome, intelligent people, who would witness both in word and in their lives, that Christian Science has come to them to deepen and quicken their spiritual sense, to intensify their love for the Bible and for all that is good, beautiful, and true, to clarify their concept of God and beget an altogether new and more helpful sense of His abiding nearness, to increase their love for the Master, and their sincere desire to be entirely subject to the Mind that was in him. They would witness that through their knowledge of the truth as illumined and explained in Christian Science, they have acquired a spiritual supremacy over the world, the flesh and the devil, never before known, have entered into the joy fear and physical bondage, and have entered into the joy of the Lord, so that their hearts are gladder, their homes happier, their influence more stimulating and cheering to others. They would say to you that, applying the Master's test, and judging the tree by its fruits, they are led to entertain the highest regard for the teaching of Christian Science, and the deepest love for the one who brought its blessings to their door.

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An Appeal for Fair Judgment

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