Article June 5, 1909 Issue

The critic's method of denial, apart from its discourtesy...

Frederick Dixon—London, Eng.

Medical Times

The critic's method of denial, apart from its discourtesy, is perilously like that of the Jews towards a certain blind man whom Jesus healed. First they suggested he had never been blind, and when they found they could not substantiate this, they fell back on the simplest form of repudiation, "they cast him out." Still out of the record of that dispute, the simple testimony of the man has come crushing down the centuries, "One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see." The human mind, if I may adapt a phrase of Talleyrand's seems to forget nothing and to learn nothing. Thousands of people who have been healed in Christian Science are daily being told that they were never sick, but they know better, and those who love them know better, and so there is thundering out today, from a million voices, the shout, "One thing we know, that whereas we were blind now we see." Now, in the historic phrase of Captain Bunsby, "the bearings of this observation lies in the application on it." and the application of it is this, that the Christian Scientist has every whit as reliable evidence of the truth of his hypotheses as the natural scientist has of his.

Christian Science maintains that the one eternal First Cause is that divine Mind, or Spirit, which in some form or another men worship as God. It deduces from this that all causation is spiritual, and that there is no real law consequently but God's law. It maintains that this was the teaching of Christ Jesus, and that he demonstrated in his ministry the variability and consequently the lawlessness of all so-called physical law. This is why Mrs. Eddy has written on page 170 of Science and Health, "Spiritual causation is the one question to be considered, for more than all others spiritual causation relates to human progress."

When the critic reaches the conclusion that physical bodies, whether as phenomena resulting from matter, or mortal consciousness, are real, he reaches the point where his philosophy is contradicted utterly by the teaching of Christian Science, and the question resolves itself into one of demonstration. What he means by implying that Christian Science teaches that matter "is spirit or will ultimately resolve itself into spirit," it is impossible to conceive. Every statement of Christian Science is indeed a categorical denial of any such suggestion. The suggestion is indeed the inevitable outcome of the theological dual contention that God created all things and that matter is real, and this is the point above all others at which Christian Science severs itself from orthodox theology, for, as the doctor says, "it places spirit in the hands of the chemist."

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