It is sometimes said by the critics of Christian Science...
The Onlooker
It is sometimes said by the critics of Christian Science that the Bible is ignored in that religion, sometimes even that Christian Scientists have a Bible of their own. Such a criticism is among the wildest of those prevalent. The most rudimentary knowledge of Science and Health should be sufficient to convince any one that, so far from supplanting the Bible, there never was a book which more completely met the requirements of the great saying of the Lord Chancellor Erskine, "The best turn any book can do its reader is to refer him to the Bible."
In "Retrospection and Introspection," the autobiographical sketch in which Mrs. Eddy has given the world all that it is right or necessary they should know of her private life, she has explained how, with the Bible as her clue, she groped her way within the labyrinth of human theories and speculations, until she stood, at last, before the gate that is strait, on the way that is narrow, and "which leadeth unto life." In all these strivings, she has told us, the Bible was her only text-book, the book in which Rousseau has said "a giant may swim and a child wade." And when, in the year 1875, her own book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," was published, it was, as the Christian Science commentary on the Bible, to become, jointly with the Bible, the textbook of Christian Science. "Christian Scientists," wrote Mrs. Eddy in a letter printed in The Christian Science Journal of May, 1906, "are fishers of men. The Bible is our sea-beaten Rock. It guides the fishermen. It stands the storm. It engages the attention and enriches the being of all men."
The first of the six tenets of the Christian Science Church, which are to be found on page 497 of Science and Health, reads as follows: "As adherents of Truth, we take the inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life." Not merely the New Testament, but the Old: Alpha and Omega, Genesis and Revelation. "The Hebrew Bible," says Carlyle, "is it not before all things true, as no other book ever was or will be?" And it was the Hebrew Bible of which Jesus spoke when he said, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law. or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." The law and the prophets as Jesus understood them were the books of the Old Testament, as we have them to-day; and the method by which he proceeded to fulfil them was probably the exact antithesis of anything to which the Jewish hierarchy or the Jewish people had looked forward. It was summed up in the command, "Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are God's." He claimed the mantle not of Joshua or of Gideon, but of the shepherd of the 23d Psalm. He came to Jerusalem not as David came, with an army and the sword, but riding amidst his disciples on the colt of an ass.
That it was the will of God and not of Cæsar, the spiritual and not the material interpretation of the law and the prophets, which was to guide men's footsteps along the narrow way, Jesus' teaching made manifest, and in Science and Health Mrs. Eddy has steadfastly led human thought back to this, when she insists on the spiritual as against the historical importance of the text. Theoretically the Jews have always admitted this, and that the early Christian Church accepted it is evidently from Origen's reply to Celsus. Celsus had evidently taunted the Church in Rome with the stories of creation and the conquest of Canaan. Origen retorted that the story of Paradise was an allegory, and that by the Canaanites were intended the Israelites' own animal propensities. And yet the churches which claim Origen as a father object to Mrs. Eddy's definition of Adam and Canaan.
It is sometimes said that Christian Science is recruited from the classes imperfectly instructed in the Bible, but it is notorious and obvious that the seceders from established creeds have been drawn, not from the Laodiceans, but from those who have thought themselves free from accepted dogmas, not, as Ruskin would have said, because they were free-thinkers, but because they were stern and close thinkers. Paul thought in this way, and they called him a "pestilent fellow;" Wyclif, and they called him "schism's broacher;" Luther, and they called him "a drunken friar;" and now, calm as Paul amidst the tumult in the market at Athens, Mrs. Eddy is pointing the world once again to that primitive and practical Christianity which the great apostle preached in the Areopagus and demonstrated in the street at Troas. To whatever exttent, however, Christian Scientists may have read the Bible before they accepted Christian Science, there is no question that from that moment they become close and earnest students of it. Such a course is absolutely essential to their progress. It is manifestly impossible to study a commentary on any text intelligently without familiarizing yourself with that text; and consequently, if you are going to master Science and Health, you must also master the Bible. The very form of church service adopted concentrates the attention of the congregation on the Bible. ... Now, it is clear that the study of the Bible should not degenerate into a mere intellectual pursuit; if it does, it will inevitably degenerate also into "doubtful disputations." It should be devoted to the effort to grasp the truth of Jesus' teaching sufficiently to demonstrate it in the way demanded by him when he said that those who believed in him would be able to do his works. In the light of this, the importance of healing in the Christian Science movement is seen in its true proportion and perspective. Mrs. Eddy maintains that the Christian Science student should heal by teaching. And in proportion as he does this he will prove to his patient the absolute powerlessness of evil by filling his consciousness with that abiding sense of the allness of God, of Life, of Truth, and of Love, which was what Jesus referred to when he said, "The kingdom of God is within you."
