Article October 19, 1907 Issue

The practice of Christian Science is not a business, but...

Alfred Farlow

Government

The practice of Christian Science is not a business, but a ministry. It is, primarily, the practice of religious tenets, which improves the patient spiritually, and in consequence furnishes bodily relief. Every man, woman, and child, with even a small understanding of Christian Science, becomes a practitioner in a degree, for his religion is practical, and he is not a consistent believer unless he practises what he preaches. He is able to heal in the ratio of his understanding. Hence a law compelling a medical education would affect every member of the Christian Science Church, for all are practitioners, though all do not make a specialty of it. We wonder how many clergymen would remain in the ministry if they were compelled to have a four-years medical course before being permitted to pray for their parishioners. Why is it that the requirement of medical knowledge as a qualification for safe prayer had not been thought of until Christian Scientists appeared in the arena of human affairs? All Christians pray for the sick, whatever may be their afflictions, but no legislative body or medical association has ever concerned itself in the kind of prayer that is offered by any other religious sect.

It has been argued that Christian Science is a menace because some depend upon it who should have medicine, and even suffer and die in consequence; but this position is not tenable, for there is no way of proving or concluding that such calamity is occasioned by want of drugs, since the world is full of suffering ones who have done and are doing all that materia medica affords them in the effort to obtain relief, and are still "none the better" but "rather growing worse."

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