Article October 3, 1908 Issue

Our critic closes his last letter with the famous warning...

Frederick Dixon—Deptford, S. E. Eng.

Sydenham Gazette

Our critic closes his last letter with the famous warning of Timothy against "science falsely so called." It may be incidentally remarked that as science does not happen to be the exact rendering of the Greek text, as may be seen by consulting the Revised Version, the quotation is scarcely so appropriate as he had hoped; indeed, I am afraid he scarcely recognizes that it has been used ad nauseam against precisely that kind of knowledge which he himself regards as scientific. All this, however, is by the way. For centuries people have been using these warnings of the New Testament against everybody with whom they have chanced to disagree, precisely in our critic's manner. They have, in short, been so particularly busy in pointing out the things their neighbors ought not to have done as to have curtailed seriously their own opportunities for doing the things they themselves ought to have done. The Christian Scientist recognizes this. Perfectly convinced of the truth of Gamaliel's great apothegm, he devotes his energies to the incessant struggle with all that is unlike God, and is never found writing to the papers to point out his neighbors' shortcomings. The Christian Scientist has become a Christian Scientist because he is convinced that the teaching of Mrs. Eddy, as given to the world in Science and Health, is at once the most beautiful and the most practical which he has ever known. That teaching, Mrs. Eddy herself has insisted, on nearly every page of Science and Health, is the teaching which Jesus gave to the world almost two thousand years ago; and when our critic explains that Christian Science was born centuries before Mrs. Eddy was thought of he is merely offering conclusive evidence of the fact, which could never have been a secret to any Christian Scientist, that he has never properly read Science and Health.

This healing power, our critic may be quite sure, will never be demonstrated by means of giving a child a thrashing in order to prove to him that there is no pain. A Christian Scientist who thrashed a child by the way of proving that there was no sensation in matter could not possibly have an existence anywhere outside our critic's imagination. He is evidently confusing the teaching of Proverbs with that of the Gospels. Jesus said, "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not," but he nowhere suggested what is supposed to have been the advice of Solomon. Solomon believed in the theory of sacrificing herds of cattle to propitiate God, who was held to have created these cattle, and so, possibly, he did approve of inflicting pain on man held to have been made in the image and likeness of God; Jesus overthrew the tables of the moneychangers and the tables of those who sold doves, and in so doing turned human thought from the idea of inflicting pain as a means of worship or government towards a truer understanding of God, who is Love.

Our critic quarrels with Christian Scientists because he says that the God of Christian Scientists "has no shape." The God of Christian Scientists is infinite, divine Love, and it is beyond any Christian Scientist to confine infinity to shape. He will probably find that giving a shape to God ends in anthropomorphism, it ends in setting up a Jehovah with the form of a man and the passions of a man; a Jehovah who can be appealed to with the blood of goats and rams. Christian Science has come to make new again the old teaching of the New Testament. It is doing this by teaching men to overcome "the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life" in themselves rather than in their neighbors, and it is certain that just in the proportion in which this is done will man truthfully be able to say, "The kingdom of God is within you."

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