Article April 3, 1909 Issue

The bishop says of sin that the Christian Scientist ignores...

Frederick Dixon—London, England.

Kensington News

The bishop says of sin that the Christian Scientist ignores it, but that Jesus acknowledged its reality and overcame it. Now the word reality is used in Christian Science to express the absolute, that is, the spiritual and eternal, as opposed to the material sense of sin and suffering. When, therefore, the Christian Scientist says that pain is unreal, he means that it has no place in God's kingdom, and "the kingdom of God is within you." This does not in the least mean that suffering does not seem desperately real to the human consciousness. Mrs. Eddy says, "Sickness is neither imaginary nor unreal,—that is, to the frightened, false sense of the patient. Sickness is more than fancy; it is solid conviction. It is therefore to be dealt with through right apprehension of the truth of being" (Science and Health, p. 460). What is this right apprehension? According to Christian Science it is the perception of the eternal fact that there is no power in evil which can turn men's thoughts from God into channels of sickness and sin. The persistent effort to attain this apprehension fulfils the command of the apostle to "pray without ceasing," and in proportion as he succeeds man "enters heaven with prayer." He finds, that is, the "right apprehension of the truth of being," which consists in letting that "mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus," and he begins to overcome suffering as Jesus overcame it, certainly not by ignoring it, but by destroying its cause; and as he does this he learns that "heav'n is all around us now, if we but lift our eyes."

The Christian Science worker, constantly spending all his day in shop or office, and after that sitting long into the night by the bedside of the sick, is in little danger of "ignoring pain" or of becoming "self-centered." That is the criticism of those whose knowledge of Christian Science is theoretical. As for sin, to the Christian Scientist it is the belief in anything that is unlike God. He does not ignore it, he never palliates it, but he insists that it is not real because it is no part of the spiritual and eternal. There is a paragraph on page 448 of Science and Health with which the bishop's own words seem to agree almost exactly: "When the Publican's wail went out to the great heart of Love, it won his humble desire. Evil which obtains in the bodily senses, but which the heart condemns, has no foundation; but if evil is uncondemned, it is undenied and nurtured. Under such circumstances, to say that there is no evil, is an evil in itself."

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

The bishop says of sin that the Christian Scientist ignores...

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access