Article December 12, 1908 Issue

As to our critic's main argument, may I explain, once...

Frederick Dixon—London, Eng.

The Medical Times

As to our critic's main argument, may I explain, once more, that I have no objection whatever to his applying the word miracle to cases of Christian Science healing, if he will use it in the true sense of the Greek words, so translated, in the New Testament, or even in the sense in which the Latin word was used by the pagan philosophers. What I do object to is his using it, in an arbitrary doctrinal sense, to imply something supernatural, a sense only adopted at a period subsequent to the composition of the Vulgate. If he will do this, he will find that the miracle will become a synonym for the demonstration of the theology of Jesus, who used it not as a claim on his own part to divinity, but as the test of the Christianity of those who professed to have accepted his teaching. Consequently, James taught that faith without works, profession without demonstration, is dead.

So long as the Church worked miracles, Christendom accepted the healing of physical disease by spiritual means as a natural process. When, however, the Church proclaimed Jesus as God, and declared that the working of miracles was confined to the Godhead, the miracle which to John had been the semeion or proof of man's understanding of the law which clothes the grass of the field. became "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity." ...

Even in spite of this the miracle never became extinct. It might, and no doubt did, constitute a rare and remarkable phenomenon, awe-inspiring to those who had experience of it, nevertheless it continued. If, as our critic maintains, proof consists of evidence sufficient to convince the great majority, the proof of the working of miracles is irrefutable. To-day the labors of the Christian Science churches are lifting that evidence from the level of mere sporadic incidence into the realm of Science. Week after week, month after month, for many years past, in the pages of the Christian Science Sentinel and Journal, and from the Wednesday testimony meetings in the churches, there has been going out a stream of evidence, rising geometrically in an ever-increasing ratio, to which if a man wishes to stop his ears he must go and nest with the pelican in the wilderness, or like the ostrich bury his head in the sand of the desert.

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