Article August 22, 1908 Issue

The astonishing growth of the Christian Science...

Cannon Falls (Minn.) Beacon

The astonishing growth of the Christian Science churches and the attendant comparative falling off in the growth of other orthodox church membership have led the other churches—notably the Methodists and Episcopalians—to adopt into their church system a mental healing feature. Taking their cue from the orthodox medical fraternity, they attribute what results they obtain to the therapeutic power of suggestion. This is of course substantially opposed to the Christian Science theory, which is that they have rediscovered and readopted a very plain and simple though divine law of nature, whereby a proper appeal, in a proper spirit of worship and harmony with God, the all-Father and the all-Spirit, will bring about a proper and perfect adjustment of our physical forces and a restoration of diseased or enfeebled tissue. ...

Applying to the records of authenticated Christian Science cures the explanations of the apostles of Esculapius and the devotees of the drug cure, there still remains a great army of witnesses of thousands of cures that are unaccounted for on any hypothesis of common intelligence, common sense, and common honesty, covering practically the entire range of organic lesion. Nature abhors a vacuum; it is the law that when conditions become unbearable along any given line a change more or less revolutionary must occur. It is claimed, with how much justification we do not pretend to say, that the orthodox healing art has failed to keep abreast of the needs of the race, and is thus responsible for these psychological innovations. During moments of professional relaxation, in friendly converse, when, so to speak, the bars are down, in semiconfidential tones our friends the doctors frequently admit that as the science of medicine advances less drugs are prescribed. Why? It seems to be a matter among both medical men and laymen of the ability to break away from inherited or preconceived ideas; of ridding one's self of the belief that there is a revengeful element in nature or in nature's God, that must needs be propitiated by human bodily suffering for human mental mistakes; for surely, in acts of wisdom and folly alike, the body is servant to the mind. This will perhaps explain the uncompromising attitude of the medical profession toward the Christian Science theory and the cures it claims. Yet it is a most unscientific attitude to assume, and one by no means justified by the record of medical science; for, admitting freely and gratefully its benefits to mankind, what department of science has left a trail so well defined by fatal and fateful mistakes as has medicine? With all its demonstrated fallibility, does medical science assume to define with a brief and final edict the metes and bounds of that zone shrouded in impenetrable mist that lies between the grossly physical and the sunlit realm that lies beyond the verge of life? Even the exact sciences are in a state of transition, of evolvement. Do the apostles of medicine assume then to say the final word regarding the possibilities of a field which they have invaded in the most cursory manner, with reluctant steps, and by what have been unintentional experiments, producing what have often been unrecognized results? ...

The structure of truth as it has been reared through the ages is but a patchwork undergoing continual change, a jot being added here and a tittle removed there. Who then shall arrogate to himself the prerogative of a court of last resort as to what is true and sound and what false and absurd? Who shall venture ... the dogmatic assertion—for it is incapable of proof—that on a plane higher than the materialism of suggestion there may not reign a law the spiritual understanding of which brings man into healing harmony with the all-creative, the all-wisdom, the all-love, the all-law? Happily for the world it has never accepted as binding the edict of any set of men in either science or religion, but has gone bravely on, often blindly stumbling on to new elements of truth, undermining dogmas that had nothing but age to lend them respect.

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