Article October 22, 1910 Issue

If there is one thing that is absolutely certain, it is that...

William J. Bonnin

Manchester (Eng.) Chronicle

If there is one thing that is absolutely certain, it is that Christian Science, so far from being based upon what is known as suggestion, is the very polar opposite to and exterminator of all forms of suggestion, or belief in the power of one human or mortal mind over another. That statement cannot be made in terms which are too sweeping. The merest beginner in the study of Christian Science recognizes it. Your contributor, "Hubert," appears to think differently. In your last issue he wrote one column of sound sense on the subject of suggestion. He wrote also another column on his strange conception of Christian Science, which, unfortunately, was neither sound nor sensible.

A brief consideration from one point of view of what Christian Science really does teach will best show how painfully wanting he was in any understanding of his subject. Granted that there is man and the universe, what do we know of them? Do we know anything beyond certain states of our own consciousness? Are those states of consciousness the effect of some existence, real, independent, objective, without ourselves? Or are the appearances which go to form the visible material universe the projected effect of our consciousness? In other words, is absolute Truth, apart from our human relative concept of it, physical and material, or is it metaphysical and spiritual? Both it cannot be. Christian Science comes to declare that Truth is spiritual, and that materialism is error. And here it would be well to warn any one who might feel tempted to deride this fundamental teaching of Christian Science of the reality of Spirit and consequent unreality of matter, that to do so is not only to controvert the greatest spiritual Teacher of all ages, but also to mock at the whole school of philosophic idealism.

Fichte, for instance, worte (and Carlyle endorsed it) that "all things which we see or work with in this earth are as a kind of vesture or sensuous appearance: under all there lies, as the essence of them, the divine idea of the world, the reality which lies at the bottom of all appearance." And while Huxley put matter down as "the unknown hypothetical cause of states of our own consciousness," Ostwald, who was recently awarded a Nobel prize, has thus defined it: "Matter is a thing of thought which we have constituted for ourselves rather imperfectly to represent what is permanent in the change of phenomenon."

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