Article January 25, 1908 Issue

We hear much adverse criticism nowadays of the rapidly...

Rosalie Neish—London, England.

M. A. P

We hear much adverse criticism nowadays of the rapidly increasing representatives of Christian Science; but these people possess two at least of the great virtues the Christian religion has ever taught and emphasized. You never find a Christian Scientist hard on sinners, since one of their beliefs is that goodness and Love alone can replace evil, even as sunlight floods the darkness. Their other virtue is the almost supreme one of faith.

As one who is not a Christian Scientist I recognize the greatness of this virtue of faith, so simple in reality, being merely the teaching of the Great Master put into practice. Their whole creed is to practise love and patience, and this patience extends even to those who "revile" them. We Church people, on the other hand, have become, I fear, so sadly bound up and hemmed in by learned dogmas that we have lost sight of the simplicity of Christianity, and so we "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel," we cling to our dogmas and engage in bitter controversies, forgetting entirely that love is the real and only fulfilling of the law.

What Christian Scientists say, they believe, and the chief factor indeed of their religion is this invincible and yet simple faith; whereas we Church people, alas! have mostly long since lost our faith in the very miracles we read about every Sunday in church. Although we are distinctly told by the Master that we also can do these things, and greater than these, we are too much like the lady who, on hearing in church that faith could even remove a mountain, went home and prayed that the mountain before her door might be taken away in the night, and on coming down the following morning and finding it still there, exclaimed triumphantly, "I thought so." Now that is an attitude which is never taken by Christian Scientists.

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