Article May 23, 1908 Issue

Has it ever occurred to our critic why so many sane,...

Reuben Pogson—York, Eng.

Yorkshire Herald,

Has it ever occurred to our critic why so many sane, clean men and women have left the teachings of the Church and become practically agnostic? Does he not know that Christian Science has converted more agnostics than all the other denominations put together during the last ten years? Why is this? The answer is simple. It is because Christian Science takes the terms used by the Christian Church to declare the nature of God, and actually sticks to them, and without any evasive shuffling, but with persistent, unswerving logic, deduces all the statements found in the Christian Science text-book. Moreover, it fairly and squarely proves the correctness of its deductions by demonstrating them in actual practice. Is there a theologian or logician existing who from the propositions that God is Spirit and God is All-in-all can draw a conclusion that will account matter, evil, disease, death as realities? It is impossible—an ordinarily intelligent boy or girl can see its impossibility ! Is it within the realm of sanity thinkable, that if you lay down the postulates that light exists, and that light is all-in-all, you can find any method to account darkness as existence, real, and substantial? So Christian Science teaches that all discord is a state of negation, an absence of something, not a thing in itself.

The Anglican Church teaches the omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience of God, and I suggest that it is impossible to find one statement in the teaching of Christian Science that is at variance with these three great verities; nay, more, I suggest that it is absolutely impossible for the Church to maintain any theory that will stand the test of reasonable logic if that theory declares for the reality of matter, sin, disease, and death. The critic admits that "our Saviour always counted disease an enemy to be overcome;" but is a thing entirely overcome unless its capacity to resume its attack is destroyed? No. Can you destroy anything that is real ; that is, real in a scientific sense, in the sense that Truth is real? No. Anything that can be destroyed is no part of the realities of being, however real it may seem to those who believe in its existence. Jesus said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." This is a declaration of the reality, hence indestructibility of Truth, and consequently the destructibility and unreality of error. Christian Science does not deny that evil and disease seem real to the mortal or carnal sense. From this it must necessarily follow that to the immortal or divine Mind evil and disease must be unreal, for the divine Mind and the carnal mind are antipodal to each other, hence, if one is real the other must be unreal. The mistake of orthodox Christianity has been in thinking that the finite is the creation of the infinite, the mortal the creation of the immortal, failing to see that if it were possible for the infinite to think finitely He would cease to be infinite.

Christian Scientists do not deny the "existence of things necessary for their life on earth." What they do say is that this life of which we are cognizant through the material sense, is a state of consciousness which has no more actuality in relation to the spiritual and eternal than a nightmare has in relation to the normal waking state of existence. That while we are on this plane of existence we need to have the food and clothing, etc., which is deemed necessary by, and is in fact a component part of, this plane of consciousness; but as we rise in the scale of being we shall be able to declare to the material senses that we "have meat to eat that ye know not of," and prove this as Jesus did as he sat on Jacob's well outside the city of Sychar. If, as the critic said, the cases of healing contained in Science and Health "are no more remarkable than cases he had heard of in the experience of clergymen he had intimately known"—a somewhat vague testimony!—how is it that the world has not had the benefit of hearing of these cases, and why does not the Church offer to heal the sick as well as reform the sinner?

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