Article December 16, 1905 Issue

What a Clergyman Says

J. HERMAN RANDALL

When we look around us to-day we find that there are many movements in society that are known by various names. They are called "fads" by a good many people, and yet, you know, when we apply the word "fad" to anything, we may simply be betraying our own ignorance; it need not describe the thing we call by that name at all. There are many vital movements in society, a few of which I want to briefly refer to, because of their significance in this connection.

The Christian Science propaganda, which has sprung up and grown so rapidly within these last few years, is one of the clear indications of the returning age of faith. It is foolish for us to say that there is "nothing Christian or nothing scientific in it." It is perfectly absurd for us to point the finger of ridicule at these good men and women, in our community and elsewhere, and talk about them as being queer and fanatics and unbalanced, in order to accept the philosophy they do. All this is superficial and unjust and untrue. I want to ask you what is the deep significance of the Christian Science movement in our country and in England, an organization that has built these beautiful temples of worship, that has during these years attracted these hundreds of thousands of intelligent men and women, and that seems to hold them together with a devotion and a spirit of self-sacrifice that puts to shame the orthodox church in the community? You cannot brush it away lightly and say that these people are possessed of fewer brains than you and I. What does it mean? To me it is one of the clearest, surest signs of the returning age of faith. When the materialistic ipse dixit dared to stand up in university hall and on lecture platform, and through countless books affirmed that all was matter, that thought was simply the product of the brain,—that it was impossible for man to ever think of himself as being possessed of a soul, that the future life was only a fairy dream,—when, in other words, science in many quarters was telling men that the only meaning of life was to be found in terms of matter, then it was, do you not see, that the reaction came. And it is a splendid thing about man that this reaction does come again and again through history as the pendulum swings backward. So the Christian Science movement comes into being; it stands confronting the materialistic hypothesis and says to it. If you affirm that all is matter, we dare to stand and affirm with equal positiveness that all is Spirit. I thank God for such a movement, if for nothing else, that it dared to throw the gauntlet back into the face of a crass, materialistic philosophy. We may feel that the Christian Scientist takes certain truths or certain facts out of their relation with others and emphasizes them unduly, gives them a prominence perhaps that they should not have, out of relation with other things. You and I may criticise their philosophy from one point of view or another, but I am not here to do that this morning. I am here to point out the significance and the deeper meaning of this great movement for our age, and to me it is found in that fact. It is the splendid protest of man's spiritual nature against all the facts and against all the forces that would seek to relegate and push him down to where he would be as a beast of the field.

Extract from a sermon by REV. J. HERMAN RANDALL.
Grand Rapids, Mich.

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