Article March 20, 1909 Issue

It is part of the fundamental teaching of Christian Science...

Frederick Dixon—London, England.

The Baptist

It is part of the fundamental teaching of Christian Science that there is no such thing as Christian psychology. Such a theory inevitably ends in making God responsible for all that is unlike Himself.

Even if the claims of Christian Science are ultimately justified, says our critic, "it will yet remain to be shown that the system is one of wide application, owing ot the fact that many persons do not seem to be susceptibel to suggestion." It would be difficult to illustrate more clearly what Mrs. Eddy means in writing, on page 28 of Science and Health, of "the determination to hold Spirit in the grasp of matter." Our critic has written a book in which she consistently insists on referring Christian Science healing not to prayer, but to hypnotic suggestion in one or another of its many variants, and as a result she has produced a parody of the teaching she professes to elucidate. She apparently sees no contradiction between Christian healing and healing by suggestion, but Science and Health, the text-book of Christian Science, is one sustained protest against the theory that the human mind is a healing factor at all. If it were, it could indeed be said that the same fountain does bring forth sweet water and bitter, since no one has yet been found to maintain that the human mind does not also produce sickness and sin. It is just this idea which is alluded to in Genesis as the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the result of eating which is described as death.

Jesus said, "A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit." Christian Science, accepting the teaching of Jesus, asserts that, this being so, any healing which may seem to result from the action of the human mind cannot be other than a tempered form of evil, which is essentially evil in itself. Our philosopher-critic has fallen into the same mistake as the philosopher who declared that vice in losing all its coarseness had lost half its danger. The moral sense of Burke's countrymen revolted from the hideous fallacy of that oratorical epigram; and the moral sense of the country will as surely revolt from the claim that there is any true healing to be gained from hypnotic suggestion, when it grasps what hypnotic suggestion means. Evil is no more power in an attenuated than in a robust form, even as vice was no less dangerous on the terraces at Versailles than amidst the squalor of St. Antoine. The only true thing that can be said of evil is that it is a lie; the only semblance of power it can ever manifest is the illusion produced by being deceived by a lie.

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