Article September 22, 1906 Issue

SIGNS FOLLOWING

FRANK H. SPRAGUE.

Christian Scientists are sometimes charged with inconsistency in citing cases of healing to prove the validity of their position; since, it is alleged, evidence of this description must be obtained by consulting the physical sense, whose reliability the teaching of Christian Science denies. Only, however, by a forced construction of the phraseology of certain doctrinal statements bearing on this point is it possible to reach such a conclusion.

If, as Christian Science avers, creation is wholly spiritual, and if, as Paul declared, spiritual things are spiritually discerned, it follows that every conceivable aspect of materiality is foreign to the truth of being, and must, therefore, be excluded from the category of real things. This being the case, the very belief in material functions and modes of perception—a belief which opens the door to every conceivable form and phase of erroneous thinking and the disastrous consequences resulting therefrom—must be misgrounded.

If Christian Science were merely a transcendental philosophy, dealing with the problems of being in the abstract, the case might rest here; but, on the contrary, this Science reveals, a working basis, according to which everything that appears to deny the spiritual facts of existence may be eliminated, by progressive stages, from human consciousness. In the present stage of this winnowing process the wheat of spiritual perception and the chaff of material sensation appear so subtly interblended that nothing but Divine Science, the Word of God,—which, according to Paul, is "sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit,"—can distinguish and separate them, and until human consciousness advances beyond this stage, it is necessary that the conditions demanded by the modus operandi of present belief be complied with.

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