Article October 9, 1909 Issue

In a famous sentence Carlyle once declared that little...

Frederick Dixon

Literary Guide

[The readers of the Sentinel will be pleased with the logical and scholarly manner in which some recent mis-statements of Christian Science are met in the article which follows. — EDITOR.]

In a famous sentence Carlyle once declared that little knowledge of a man was to he gained by dwelling only on what those who disagreed with him were pleased to consider as his faults. The great Rembrandt of words knew better than most men what he was speaking of. He had waded through the quagmires of tracts in which the biographers of the past had scrupulously distorted the stories of the careers of those who had the audacity to be opposed to them, and be knew that the man did not exist whom it was not possible to represent as possessed of seven devils. It is a fact, which there is no difficulty in understanding, that, while this class of biography has disappeared from every other phase of literature, it is still not uncommon when its subject is a religious thinker; and the consequence is that we have people writing today of Mrs. Eddy very much as the ecclesiastics of the fourteenth century wrote of Wyclif.

There is nothing in the teaching of Christian Science to rouse such antagonism in any one, either from the point of view of Christianity or Freethought, of revelation or of science. From a Christian point of view, Christian Science is based on an understanding of the Bible which is at once reverent and practical; from the standpoint of Freethought, it outrages no principle of individual judgement; while it is so essentially scientific that it requires that its premises should be reduced to demonstration It is obvious that there is absolutely nothing in such a religion to arouse the extraordinary venom which is so frequently manifested in the attack in Christian Science. The venom of that attack must be accounted for on other grounds. These grounds are, first, the natural antipathy of evil to good, and, secondly, the misconception of Christian Science teaching where this antipathy is not apparent.

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In a famous sentence Carlyle once declared that little...

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