Article December 5, 1908 Issue

One of the main stumbling-blocks to our critic is the...

Rev. G. A. Kratzer

Fitchburg (Mass.) Sentinel

One of the main stumbling-blocks to our critic is the fact that Christian Science holds to the unreality of sickness, sin, matter, mortal mind and mortal bodies. To the world, all these things are realities; but St. Paul tells us, "God chose what the world calls foolish to put its wise men to shame, and God chose what the world calls weak to put its 'strength' to shame, and God chose those whom the world calls low-born and beneath regard—mere nobodies—to put down its 'somebodies'" (Twentieth Century New Testament). Christian Science, though counted by the world "foolish," "weak," and "beneath regard," is daily "bringing to nothing" the supposed realities of sin and disease by absolutely destroying them; and, in time to come, the advancing understanding of Christian Science will fully demonstrate the unreality and nothingness of matter. St. John foresaw that time when he wrote: "I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away." God spake through the prophet Isaiah: "I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind."

Our critic objects to Christian Science because it does not believe in the reality of the devil. Jesus himself said, concerning the devil: "He ... abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him, ... he is a liar." It is to the credit of Christian Science that it does not believe in a lie or a liar. If there is no truth in the devil, there certainly is no reality in him; for only the true is real. Falsehood is untrue and unreal, and can he proven so, sooner or later. In using the phrase, "science falsely so-called," St. Paul did not refer to Christian Science, but to that so-called science which is based on a mortal sense of things that are seen. The things that are seen, St. Paul informs us, are temporal. So, accordingly, must be the knowledge, or so-called science, based on them. Knowledge which is only temporary is not real or true, according to well-considered definitions of truth and reality. True Science has to do with the things which are eternal; and this is Christian Science, which the so-called science, based on sense testimony, always has opposed, and now opposes, as it must from its nature, "because the carnal mind [the mind based on sense testimony] is enmity against God."

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