Article March 6, 1909 Issue

There is in the Westminster Library a copy of Science and Health...

Frederick Dixon—England.

Medical Press

There is in the Westminster Library a copy of Science and Health, the fly-leaf of which is endorsed, in the handwriting of one of the Abbey's great deans, as presented by Arthur Stanley. Now no doubt Dean Stanley knew, quite as well as our critic, that the teaching of that book was not in conformity with the teaching of the Church of England, but I think he knew something else, which our critic is in danger of forgetting—that you cannot define Christianity in a dogma, and that the great apostle to the Gentiles knew what he was talking about when he wrote the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians (Rev. Ver.): "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. . . . But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love." If our critic believes that God is conscious of all the sufferings of humanity, ought he not to pray, and teach the patient to pray, to God to remove this suffering, for, as James writes, "the prayer of faith shall save the sick," and ought he not to discountenance the ministrations (I am writing this absolutely without a thought of offense) of every doctor who is not a Christian? On his own showing, what could be more blasphemous than to call in an agnostic to destroy a disease of which God was conscious, and which He had not been prayed to destroy, or having been prayed to destroy had permitted to remain!

As for the doctor's objection to the term science, it is frankly amazing. The word science has a specific meaning, which can be discovered by consulting a dictionary, and the use of it in the term Christian Science is absolutely justified by every philolgic law. He first begs the question by assuming that disease is purely material in its origin, and so brushes aside the entire structure of idealism, as it exists quite apart from Christian Science; and then he assumes a theory of Christian Science treatment which, honestly, is quite ludicrous in its perversion of what that treatment is. There is nothing in the whole teaching of Christian Science which can be tortured into a justification of the statement "that pain and anguish can be done away with by belief in certain dogmas or creeds, and by performance of certain rites prescribed by their special ritual;" the last of these statements, indeed, is the product of undiluted imagination. Nor has any Christian Scientist ever suggested that poison could be expelled from the system by religious emotion. What they have insisted on is that when Christian Science comes in emotion disappears.

So far from Christian Scientists being blasphemous, they are attempting to show that, because Jesus was the way, the healing of what Whittier termed "the seamless dress" is as possible today as it was in his lifetime. . . . It is because time does not alter truth that Christian Science, which is the effort to demonstrate truth practically, is scientific. The doctor may infer, as others have, that science is confined to the elucidation of secondary causes, and that primary causes are in "the realm of the unknowable," but the inference will never get beyond just what it is, a simple begging of the question. Christian Scientists will go on steadily and patiently, never attacking those from whom they differ, but seeking for understanding with which to demonstrate the truth of their theology, confident that Jesus was the way and that they can follow him.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

There is in the Westminster Library a copy of Science and Health...

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access