Article January 25, 1908 Issue

"PROVE ALL THINGS"

ELMER GREY

In a recent issue of a semi-religious weekly we were told that while Christian Science contains some marked virtues of a spiritual nature, it pushes its reliance upon spiritual revelation too far and thus becomes unreasonable; that it "refuses to submit its vision to the test of experience," and to "prove all things," as we have been advised to do by St. Paul.

The "vision" of Christian healing came to Mrs. Eddy in 1866, and in that form it was a revelation, it was not Science, strictly speaking. Science, Webster tells us, is "accumulated and established knowledge, systematized and formulated with reference to the discovery of general truths, or the operation of general laws." Knowing this, and knowing that as a revelation her discovery would not accomplish the world-wide beneficent results which she saw in it as a possibility when developed into a Science, Mrs. Eddy set about to apply to her vision the test of further experience, to assemble the results of such experience, and from the testimony of those results to lay down a truly scientific basis for the healing of disease. The fact that she did do this work and that it resulted successfully is what justified the adoption of the word "Science" in connection with the name Christian and made this name more appropriate than any other could be. Had she known but a few cases of divine healing they would still have been remarkable, but when a great number of such cases were assembled, and the laws which govern their demonstration recognized, the result constituted an achievement in the realm of true Science. A Christian clergyman once told the writer that he believed the cures of Christian Science to be accomplished by means of a universal law. He could scarcely have come nearer the truth. If, however, he had carried his remark to its logical conclusion and had admitted that the universal law which healed disease must necessarily be "the law of God, the law of good, interpreting and demonstrating the Principle and rule of universal harmony" (Rudimental Divine Science, p. 7), he would have been defining Christian Science in the words of Mrs. Eddy.

Mrs. Eddy's scientific research and demonstration reached one culmination in 1875, when "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" was given to the world. In the back of this text-book are the testimonies of many people who have been healed of disease by the method which it advances, and the nature and number of these testimonies are alone sufficient to establish beyond cavil the correctness of her theory. Not content, however, with this much evidence, Mrs. Eddy has collected in another volume, "Miscellaneous Writings," many additional testimonies of a like nature. In 1883 the Christian Science Journal, a monthly publication, was founded by her, and in 1898 the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly, was started. In every issue of these periodicals appear many testimonies of those who have been healed of disease by Christian Science. These have been verified and the originals in the form of letters are kept on file. Some of these cases have been sworn to before courts of law, while others have been corroborated by the medical doctors who had them in charge up to the time when Christian Science was resorted to. They come from nearly every portion of the civilized globe, embrace nearly every disease known to the medical profession, and a very large proportion of them are cases that were given up as hopeless by physicians. These two periodicals alone have thus accumulated an additional mass of evidence, substantiating the claims of Christian Science, which is so well-authenticated and so world-embracing in its scope that it cannot be ignored by intelligent, well-meaning people.

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