Article June 19, 1909 Issue

Christian Science starts from the premise that there is...

Captain Geoffrey Wilkinson—London.

Interpreter

Christian Science starts from the premise that there is one First Cause, self-existent, eternal, infinite; one intelligence or Mind, the Being men call Spirit or God, the Principle of all true existence. Perfect Mind expresses itself in perfect ideas, so that creation is spiritual, ideal, perfect in every detail. Now matter,—that which appears to the senses,—with all its evil and discord, is the negation of this; is, in fact, the result of the carnal or mortal mind, a false, imperfect sense of things, which, for the very reason that it is a false sense of things, must of necessity be destroyed by Truth, must cease to have even an apparent reality. Material objects are consequently the counterfeits of spiritual ideas, and, speaking absolutely, unreal; much as, from the ordinary standpoint, the distorted landscape seen through a bad pane of glass is unreal. Material selfhood is a false, imperfect, mortal sense of man's true, spiritual, perfect, eternal individuality, which in-true, spiritual, perfect, eternal individuality, which in-God, in whom "we live, and move, and have our being." Even a healthy material body is not the reality of man, but health is a nearer approximation to reality than is sickness, and is one step at any rate on the road to that final conquest over physical conditions which found its perfect expression in Jesus of Nazareth, in whom "the Word was made flesh;" through whom, that is to say, the expression of the divine Mind, the spiritual idea, was made manifest to mortals.

Any one who will read, intelligently and carefully, the above resume of Christian Science teaching, will find that it solves the difficulties brought forward by our critic. To judge by the latter's criticism, it would seem that Christian Science denied everything and left existence a dreary blank. On the contrary, it takes away nothing but the false, imperfect sense of things; it leaves the true behind. It does not say there is no rose, no landscape; it does say that the rose, and the landscape, as God created them, present a glory of which mortal sense has only a faint conception. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." "Things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." It will be noticed from what has been said that mortal mind cannot create anything; this false sense of things can only seem to counterfeit, to give a false sense of God's perfect creation.

The fact is that the critics of Christian Science persist in setting up a man of straw and then proceeding to demolish him. The point on which all without exception come to grief is their inability to distinguish those statements of Science and Health which deal with the absolute, that is, with the truth of being, the real, from those which deal with the mortal concept, the unreal. Christian Scientists have, probably almost without exception, gone through the same difficulties, the mistake arising from the tendency of the human mind to read the absolute statements relatively. Thus, when the critic sees such a statement as that man is spiritual and perfect, he immediately imagines that it applies to the ordinary mortal as such, and is either hilarious or angry over it; instead of realizing that it applies to man's real selfhood, the image and likeness of God, of which the mortal is the counterfeit. Such misconception will lead him to think, like our critic, that Christian Science teaches that mortal man is already perfect and there is no need for repentance; whereas Christian Science teaches that sin is unreal, inasmuch as it is no part of man's true selfhood, and must be proved to be unreal by its destruction, which destruction can only come about as Christ, Truth, destroys the illusion of pleasure in sin. Where Truth appears, error disappears.

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