Article December 21, 1907 Issue

Our critic complains that because Mr. Young said, in a...

Frederick Dixon

Chiswick (Eng.) Times.

Our critic complains that because Mr. Young said, in a lecture, that before criticising a statement in Christian Science you should test it by the rules of Christian Science, this necessitates accepting Christian Science first. Of course it necessitates nothing of the kind. It necessitates temporarily accepting certain premises as a working hypothesis, but how this is unscientific or illogical I think it will puzzle our critic to prove.

The critic then proceeds to illustrate his adherence to his own ideas by assuming a theory of sin which is not in accordance with Christian Science, and deducting a conclusion which he describes politely as "steeping one's self in idiocy." Christian Scientists do not get rid of the existence of sin by declaring daily for a month there is none till they come to believe it. They endeavor to go rid of it by extinguishing it in themselves, not by saying they are better than their neighbor, but by saying the owing to Christian Science they are better than they were before accepting it. They do not say that sin has no existence in the human consciousness, but that, inasmuch as it is no part of infinite good, that is of God, it can have no Principle.

Now, if God, as St. John says, knows all things, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that the wisdom of God is scientific. People, however, have grown so accustomed to separating science from religion. to insisting, that is, that knowledge of primary causes is in "the domain of unprovable assumptions," as to have come to regard science and religion as positively antithetical. Yet it is quite certain that when Paul wrote to the Church at Rome "of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God," he was thinking of something very different from the knowledge which he declared to the Corinthians should vanish away. He was speaking, in the one case, of the foolishness of God which is wiser than men, and in the other case of the wisdom of this world which is foolishness with God; in the one case of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, of which God said. "Thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die;" and in the other case of what he terms the "epignosis tou theou," the full knowledge of God, and consequently of the truth which makes men free. It is the understanding of how to gain this knowledge, and how to demonstrate practically some attainment of it, that Christian Scientists claim they have found in Christian Science.

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