Article December 21, 1907 Issue

Dr. Llewellys F. Barker, of the Johns Hopkins faculty,...

John Henry Keene

Baltimore American.

Dr. Llewellys F. Barker, of the Johns Hopkins faculty, who succeeded Dr. William Osler, is to be congratulated on having done a piece of work that was much called for. His excellent address on "Healthy-mindedness" increases special knowledge, and has given a general interest and certain importance to the great subject of "Race Culture," which rightfully, Dr. Barker says (as reported in the American), "is one of the most important and most necessary sciences of the present." Dr. Barker finds a significant guide-post to the general direction of the first-born of race culture in Christian Science. Says the doctor, "The twice-born believes in evil in the world. It believes that evil is the most important thing in life, and then considers that to assume the burden of all the sorrow of the world is its duty. It is the athletic Christianity of the once-born that has given rise to the creeds of Christian Science and mental healing. They believe in the absolute power of hope and trust and healthy-mindedness. They live in a present and future of hope. The twice-born exist in a background of remorse and discontent and despair."

So far, so good; but Christian Science means far more in "race culture" than the scientist of to-day ever dreamed of. The doctor's parallel was felicitous, but not too felicitous. Christian Science goes a little too far, a little too deep for the scientist, materialist, and physicist of to-day. Mauled, tinkered and twisted into what it is not by charlatan ignorance, Christian Science has not yet appealed to universities of learning as a new and distinct knowledge or science. What we would urge upon professors of learned universities is a scientific arrangement of the law of a subject so worthy of the most careful consideration and discussion as Christian Science. To-day they may not think the study of Christian Science very profitable, but the Science of the future will be the study of generic symbols, of a certain disposition and relation of the spiritual parts which embody and make visible the real spiritual man, who has entire control over the vertebrate skeleton of the flesh.

Philologists to-day have great opportunities in the study of Christian Science for elaborating the science of an abstract spiritual grammar. The leaders in philology, perhaps, would not think such an operation very profitable. But let us never forget that the appeals of science are always to the future. To make a cosmos out of the chaos of the public thought on Christian Science is the task of a later generation and of purer scientists. A modern Christian Science terminology, carefully worked out, is one of the most pressing needs to secure a generation of what Dr. Barker calls the "once-born." In the mean time, like early Christianity, Christian Science goes forth to the conquest of the civilized world. Christian Science is content with a basis of acknowledged fact. Its positive law of Spirit exists. What other, or whenever, or wherever was any other basis for science afforded than by an acknowledged basis of fact?

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