Article September 5, 1908 Issue

We believe that there is abundant Scriptural warrant for...

L. H. Jones

Louisville (Ky.) Herald

We believe that there is abundant Scriptural warrant for the attitude of Christian Science in denying reality to things material. It may be presumed that no one will question the scholarly attainments and eminent competency of Sir William M. Ramsay for the task he has undertaken in his book, "The Cities of St. Paul," which has just been issued from the press. We quote what he says of St. Paul's teaching on this point, for it is exactly what Christian Science teaches:—

"I should, in the first place, ask you to glance at the philosophy of history, as St. Paul declares it. To him the philosophy of history was the history of religion, for in his view there is nothing real except God. Things are permanent and firm only as they partake of the divine. All else is evanescent, mere illusion and error and uncertainty." Now this is a basic, exact, and comprehensive statement of the position of Christian Science. If it is a correct statement of Paul's teaching, since God is admittedly Spirit, then everything taught in Christian Science as to the unreality of matter and material objects follows as a necessary and inevitable corollary. For, if there is nothing real but God, and God is Spirit, then there is nothing real but Spirit, and materiality, not being Spirit, is unreal in all of its manifestations. Hence Christian Science teaches that all reality is Spirit and spiritual, and that physical nature or the material universe, being not only not spiritual, but the antipode of Spirit, is unreal in any correct application of the word reality. Yet this is the position of Christian Science, which our critic declares to be the "most absurd of all."

Does all this read as if Christian Science teaches "a theology without a God," as our critic charges? This critic is quite as wide of the mark when he says it denies personality to God and the Christ. It does deny, and it utterly repudiates, no doubt, the anthropomorphic sense of personality. It teaches that God is supreme personality and that the Christ is the expressed image and likeness of that personality. No doubt God's personality as much transcends the ordinary conception of what real personality means as God's thoughts are higher than any mortal's thoughts.

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