Article November 9, 1907 Issue

Some few years ago an English clergyman, who is today...

Frederick Dixon—London, Eng.

The Onlooker

Some few years ago an English clergyman, who is to—day in charge of a great parish in an industrial city in the north, visited one of the Christian Science churches in London. When the meeting was over he lingered to talk to those about him. He told them that it was not the first time he had attended the services, and that his attention had in the first instance been attracted by the attacks in the religious press. "I felt," he said, "certain that nothing but Truth could have aroused such intemperance and malice, and I determined to judge for myself I came, I saw, and of this I am convinced, that there is going steadily forward in the Christian Science churches a work which man cannot overthrow, nor misrepresentation in the long run overcloud. I have told those of my fellow ministers with whom I have been brought in contact, that they are attacking, not Christian Science, but their own misconception of it. and that if they do not soon find this out for themselves the public will find them out."

A generation which has bought the latest "exposures" of Christian Science and the numerous so—called lives and character sketches of its Founder may well be content to listen, in a phrase of Lord Macaulay, to a genuine anecdote on the subject. The more so as it may suggest a reason for the failure of this industry to accomplish anything of moment. The human mind is tenacious of its opinions, whether they are founded on fact or fiction. Indeed, it often clings most tenaciously to the least defensible, inasmuch as they reflect its own passions rather than the vast impersonality of Truth. In this way it has involved itself in a riot of contradictions in its attempted criticisms of Christian Science. One moment it declares that Mrs. Eddy is the tool of an unscrupulous junto, the next that she rules as despotically as Cyrus or Augustus. It is not satisfied with proving that Science and Health is an illiterate and hysterical rhapsody, it must prove simultaneously that it is "wise and sane and lucid and elevated," whilst it is so dubious about the attributes of Christian Scientists that it hesitates and is lost between ignorant buffoons, simpering ladies, astute charlatans, and refined and cultivated men and women.

Now, argument by appeal to prejudice is invariably a two—edged weapon. It may temporarily persuade those to whom the wish is father to the thought, but it is always liable to sudden and unmerciful exposure. A gentleman who had been assured that Christian Scientists were naturally effeminate, was astonished to find that three gymnasium sergeants of a neighboring military depot were regular attendants at a tiny Christian Science meeting in the eastern counties; whilst quite recently some students of natural Science from one of the great colleges in the south, who had attended another meeting in a spirit of mockery, were equally astonished when their own professor rose to add his testimony to those of the other speakers, and went home more conscious of the simple fact that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in the philosophy of the quadrangle.

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