Article February 20, 1909 Issue

The letter of Mr.—, in a recent issue, appears to contain...

Frederick Dixon

Richmond and Twickenham (Eng.) Times

The letter of Mr.—, in a recent issue, appears to contain a gently expressed indictment of Christian Science for not having changed the social system of centuries in a few years. As a matter of fact, Christian Scientists are not a rich people, and few of them are overburdened with capital. In London the great mass of them are hard workers at the ordinary avocations of this world. Outside London the chief strength of the movement lies in the manufacturing towns and the great seaports. Here, where the crash of machinery sounds in the factory-walled streets, and by the wharves, they are making their way because, workers themselves, they are showing the workers that there is a power in divine Love to save men not merely from sin and disease, but from despair and want and woe....

I do not want to claim virtues for Christian Scientists above their neighbors, but I believe they are giving unostentatiously, and in true charity, as liberally as any body of people in the entire world. For centuries reformers of every description have striven by every means in their power to overcome the horrors generated by the economic systems of the world. They have been routed by two apparent facts, the savage selfishness of one moiety of humanity and the hopeless shiftlessness of the other. It has not much mattered whether the "(Eil de Boeuf" or the Faubourgs were in power; whether philanthropists like Yao and Shun were wearing themselves out in an effort to feed their people, or reprobates like Chieh were deliberately letting them starve; the law of the survival of the fittest has exerted its seemingly inexorable mesmerism, whether in the victory of the Gothic hordes over a degenerate Latin race or in the imposition of the will of a Napoleon upon the hopes of a nation.

Today Christian Science has come to remind the world that Jesus of Nazareth, in the words of Mrs. Eddy, was not only "the best man," but "the most scientific man that ever trod the globe" (Science and Health, pp. 52, 313). The best, because he saw that the only way to reconcile the conflicting emotions and passions which we call man, to Truth was by a true understanding of the law of Love: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." And the most scientific, because he taught the only real law of the survival of the fittest when he said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." The fittest is not the few inches of humanity which constitute a successful tyrant; not an inexorable human law of supply and demand; it is not even the mountains and the sea. It is that which reflects God, the understanding of the Mind that was in Christ Jesus, of the Mind that fed the multitude by Galilee, the Mind that quelled the wind and calmed the sea, the Mind that cried in Bethany, "Lazarus, come forth."

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