Article October 1, 1910 Issue

Christian Scientists, as a matter of fact, are really often...

Frederick Dixon—England.

Outlook

Christian Scientists, as a matter of fact, are really often quite well educated, and some of them, like our critic, have even read Plato, and Aristotle, and Leibnitz. Many of them have become Christian Scientists not because they have been healed of physical disease, but because, after careful study, they have been satisfied of the scientific value of Mrs. Eddy's teaching. That, however, may be the proof of their mental perversity.

The natural scientist, to tell the simple truth, knows as little about matter as Huxley admitted he knew a score of years ago. The atom, the eon, "the flux in matter," however learnedly any one may talk of them, are naked and unashamed hypotheses. A well-known chemist told me himself quite recently that natural scientists ought to be the last people to smile at Christian faith, seeing what an amount of faith their own theories demanded. Our critic quotes Philo, but Philo himself defined faith as the perception of spiritual causation. "Spiritual causation," writes Mrs. Eddy on page 170 of Science and Health, "is the one question to be considered, for more than all others spiritual causation relates to human progress." Now what is spiritual causation but the truth, the absolute truth, as Westcott points out, the knowledge of which, Jesus said, would make men free?

This, after all, is only another way of describing that which in the epistles is spoken of as the full, exact, or scientific knowledge of God, and so of Truth; and because this knowledge is exact, it can of course be demonstrated. Jesus demonstrated this knowledge by means of the miracle, and the Greek words translated miracle in the New Testament have not, and never have had, as anybody who possesses a lexicon is aware, any supernatural significance. The miracles were the answer Jesus made to the questions put to him by the scribes and Pharisees as to what he knew, and Jesus, as Mrs. Eddy points out on page 313 of Science and Health, "was the most scientific man that ever trod the globe. He plunged beneath the material surface of things, and found the spiritual cause." What he could do, he declared, those who believed on him could do also; and if, as Philo says, faith is the perception of spiritual causation, it is easy to understand how this is the case.

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