Article April 11, 1908 Issue

COME TO FULFIL, NOT TO OPPOSE

REV. CHARLES D. REYNOLDS.

It is sometimes said that Christian Science came as a protest against certain failures of the churches and materia medica, and that like all protests it goes too far. This statement needs correction and explanation. All movements which have their starting point in protest are more or less negative in character, and employ the weapons of hostility and denunciation. This is not the case with Christian Science. This Science is not in opposition to anybody or anything. It manifests no opposing spirit to anything but error. It came by way of discovery and fulfilment, or improvement, just as all great positive movements have come, — just as the electric light, the telephone, the steam engine, the harvester, and many other things came. These new instrumentalities came because the old ones no longer supplied the increasing demand or the advancing thought. There was a pressing need for more light, more power, more rapid work. "What!" cries the self-satisfied conservative, steeped in idolatrous reverence for the conventionalities of the past, "are you going to abolish the tallow dip, the stage-coach and the sickle, and leave us in the darkness and chaos of primitive barbarism? no more convenience for travel? no instrument for harvesting our crops? no light?"

When presenting the claims of the gospel, as compared with a religion of the letter, the apostle Paul anticipated the possible fears which his Corinthian converts might feel respecting their change to a new name and form of religion, and concludes his assurance in these words, "If that which is done away was glorious, much more that which remaineth is glorious." This correct vision of the apostle, acknowledging that the old had done good service, was glorious, but that this glory was to "be done away" by reason of "the glory that excelleth," gave his gospel added power and saved it from the suspicious fears that it was a negative or atheistic movement, bent upon the destruction of that which the past had held sacred. He saw that the new was rather an unfoldment or enlargement of the old, and that in making the change one lost nothing.

This illustrates the way in which Christian Science comes to this age; not in opposition to anything, but in direct response to prayer for more light, more power, greater efficiency in Christian activity. It is the answer to a call for divine aid after all other resources, religious and medical, had failed. It is the fulfilling of the human thirst for knowledge, the capacity to understand God and man's individual relation to Him. It comes to make common cause with all that is good and just and pure. It comes to unite, not to oppose or divide. Experience teaches that in the natural sequence of events that which is best — nearest right — supplants that which is less serviceable, less correct ; but there is no conflict, no protest, between the things themselves. The conflict is wholly imaginary, existing only in the thought of the one satisfied with present conditions and desiring nothing better; or it is due to misunderstanding and ignorance of what the new method is which it is declared will supplant the old. It is not the electric light that quarrels with the tallow dip, but the mentality content with the tallow dip which imagines that the electric light has come to precipitate us into darkness. It is not the swift Pullman train that opposes the stage-coach, or the sickle that decries the harvester, but the one content with the sickle that protests.

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COME TO FULFIL, NOT TO OPPOSE

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