Article December 25, 1909 Issue

Had our critic quoted in full what Mrs. Eddy actually...

R. Stanhope Easterday

Logansport (Ind.) Pharos

Had our critic quoted in full what Mrs. Eddy actually says about "natural science," an entirely different view would have been deduced. The quotation should have read, "Natural science, as it is commonly called," etc., and if her full statement, with the correct setting of the context, had been given, it would have made clear her legitimate protest against "mere inferences drawn from material premises" (Science and Health, p. 274). Our Lord's utter eschewing of so-called material laws and physical forces, in the face of his insistence. "I am not come to destroy [the law]. but to fulfil;" "I do always the things that please Him [the Father]," and his sweeping declaration that "the flesh profiteth nothing," substantiate the Christian Science insistence that so-called material science, or so-called knowledge, based only upon such an unstable foundation as "profitless matter," does not express the Science of true being.

Your readers will now be interested to know just what Christian Science does teach on the subject of scientific research and general education, and that it conduces in no sense to a "semi-comatose condition." Briefly stated and far more forcefully than in any paraphrase by the writer, Mrs. Eddy's conception of "useful knowledge" is in these words on page 195 of Science and Health: "Through astronomy, natural history, chemistry, music, mathematics, thought passes naturally from effect back to cause. Academics of the right sort are requisite. Observation, invention, study, and original thought are expansive and should promote the growth of mortal mind out of itself, out of all that is mortal. It is the tangled barbarisms of learning which we deplore,—the mere dogma, the speculative theory, the nauseous fiction."

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