Editorial July 16, 1904 Issue

The Real Issue

W.

Most people firmly believe not a few propositions, the necessary outcome of which, were it seen, would be instantly rejected. Their growth is registered, therefore, in the successive disclosures of the illogic of their thought, and if they are honest truth-lovers, they are grateful for these discoveries, whether they are effected through the kindness of a gentle friend or the severity of an unsparing critic.

This is especially true of suffering Christian people whose earnestness and sincerity have been robbed of their legitimate return by the ignorance or prejudice into which they were born, and which has been retained as the result of an educated but unintelligent reverence for creeds.

This condition of things makes it possible for critics of Christian Science unwittingly to render general religious aspiration a distinct service by precipitating a more careful consideration of the nature and sequence of the issue between the teaching of Christian Science and all the many varieties of materialistic belief. Such an unintended good will be conveyed to its thoughtful Christian readers by a late book whose author admits the facts of Christian Science healing, soundly belabors the doctors and ministers who minify or ignore them, and then undertakes to explain them as the outcome of "neuro-psychopathic tendencies." Granting, he says, Mrs. Eddy's premises, that God, Spirit, and Spirit's manifestation include all reality, and hence that matter, Spirit's opposite, is unreal, her reasoning is logical and her conclusions necessary. Having made this frank confession that the statements of Christian Science are consistent with its premises, and that Christian Scientists "have healed the sick by hundreds of thousands," he proceeds to inveigh against the "notion" that God is all, and that there is no material thing, as a "monumental absurdity," and to ridicule the idea that the fact of healing should be adduced, "to prove the theory that there is nothing to heal!" The entirely satisfying evidence that Christian Scientists are "mentally degenerate," he finds in their obliviousness to the facts of human experience; namely, sin, sickness, and death.

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Editorial
Entering the Fold
July 16, 1904
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