Article May 2, 1908 Issue

Any person endowed with the modicum of philosophy...

Frederick Dixon—London, England.

The Outlook

Any person endowed with the modicum of philosophy engendered by a slight acquaintance with the history of the development of new ideas in the past must have long since realized the fact that Christian Science is rapidly fulfilling its destiny. When Augustine explained that the earth was flat, and that the sky was stretched from the mountain tops, he and all those who agreed with him imagined they had settled the point forever. When Galileo was forced to declare that the world was stationary, those who compelled him were quite certain that it was so. When the theory of evolution was given to the world by Darwin, it was promptly disposed of by quotations from the book of Genesis.

It was the perception of this tendency in the human mind that led Agassiz, in an often quoted passage, to declare, "Every great scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next, they say it has been discovered before. Lastly, they say they have always believed it." It is this that leads me to say that Christian Science is fulfilling its destiny. People have said for years that it conflicts with the Bible, and out of their protestation they have themselves developed the Higher Criticism and the New Theology. Then they took to saying it had been discovered before; they endeavored to mix it up with Bishop Berkeley; and out of the effort grew "Guilds of Health" and demands for the restoration of the service of healing to the Prayer-book, and for the revival of "Unction." The third stage is perhaps nearer than is imagined. The world moves rapidly to-day.... You write, "We must wonder what limits there are to the readiness of a certain type of educated and responsible mind, now growing commoner day by day, to submit to any intellecutal violence in the hope of gaining peace." But, frankly, may not that very sentence be itself a simple begging of the question, not less dogmatic in its way than the assumptions of Augustine, or of the opponents of Galileo and Darwin? What if the peace is the result of the cessation of mental restlessness in the finding of a great truth?

If you examine the matter more closely, is there anything unreasonable in this? A man of ordinary mental activity and equipoise is confronted with the problem of daily existence. If he is a Christian, he may be puzzled by the phenomena of gaols, hospitals, and workhouses in a world supposedly conceived and fashioned by divine Love; if he is an agnostic, he may be puzzled by the failure of human reason to read the riddles of the universe. In the ordinary course of inquiry he stumbles up against Christian Science. His first attitude is probably, at the best, one of contemptuous toleration, but as he probes it deeper he discovers that he is only asked to accept certain premises as working hypotheses and to carry on the investigation for himself. As he does this he discovers that the inquiry is leading him farther and farther from the study of sin, disease, and death, and deeper and deeper into the study of all that is comprised in Life, and Truth, and Love. He finds that the qualification for success lies not "in the wisdom of this world" expressed in "enticing words," but in that selfsurrender in the pursuit of Truth, in which he may learn how "old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."

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