Article July 18, 1908 Issue

It is not an extravagant assumption that those who...

Frederick Dixon

South London (Eng.) Observer

It is not an extravagant assumption that those who are daily and hourly practising a definite teaching are probably quite as good judges of what that teaching is as those who are not. For this reason alone the contention of Christian Scientists that Christian Science has nothing in common with any process of mental suggestion is entitled to respect, and cannot intelligently be brushed aside. Every Christian Scientist is of course perfectly well aware not only what mental suggestion is. but how it works. No one has ever suggested that there is anything new about it, indeed it is perfectly well known that it has been practised for centuries in the East. The danger of it lies in the fact that its asserted power is inherent in the human mind, and though the reiterated assertion of suggestions of good sent from the objective to the subconscious mind may produce relatively good results, it follows ipso facto that the reiterated assertion of evil will produce relatively bad results. This is the condition referred to by the writer of the Jehovistic document in Genesis as the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It entails the admission of evil as a power. And as the human mind is compounded rather more of evil than of good, it lays humanity open to the suggestion of all the passions by which the human mind is torn, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life."

The truth taught, on the other hand, by Jesus was absolute, and being absolute was necessarily older than any relative sense of Truth. Christian Science, therefore,—that is, the spiritual import, as Mrs. Eddy writes, of all that proceeds from the divine Mind reduced to human apprehension,—constitutes "a new, yet old, reform in religious faith." "Jesus of Nazareth," she says elsewhere [Science and Health, p. 313], "was the most scientific man that ever trod the globe. He plunged beneath the material surface of things, and found the spiritual cause."...

It was this fact of the existence of but one Mind which struck that note of the absolute in Jesus' teaching which amazed whilst it angered his listeners, and against which the material intelligence of the world rebels to-day. "Art thou a king then?" Pilate, half cynically, half perplexedly demanded of him; and Jesus answered, "Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth [the absolute truth, as one of the greatest thinkers and scholars of our own time has shown]. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice."

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