Article November 5, 1910 Issue

In the August issue of Grace Chronicle, the official publication...

Frank Bell

Allentown (Pa.) Call.

In the August issue of Grace Chronicle, the official publication of a Lutheran church in Bethlehem, Pa., the editor devotes several pages to an attack on what he apparently conceives to be Christian Science, but wherein the subject is so flagrantly misrepresented as to call for a public correction for the information of those who might otherwise accept this editor's erroneous ideas as to what constitutes Christian Science.

With that portion of the article devoted strictly to the right of a church council and pastor to designate the requisite qualifications of its membership and to withdraw the hand of fellowship from those who no longer conform thereto, an outsider may not quarrel. An organization is lawfully entitled to purge its membership of those whose professions or practices are considered by it to be at variance with its doctrines. But no pastor or other church officer has a right, in attempting to justify such action to hold such members up in public view as persons "obsessed' with ideas which they have never entertained and which are in fact as repulsive to them as they possibly could be to the pastor himself. Therein lies the occasion for this communication.

In the first place Christian Science is not a "heresy," a "miserable fad," a "humbug," or any of the other choice things named by this critic. It is none of these things because it is Christian and scientific. It is Christian because, without addition to or subtraction from, it insists upon the simple teachings of Christ Jesus as to the duty of those who would be his followers to heal the sick as well as the sinful; because it declines to be judged by any test other than that prescribed by the Founder of Christianity: "By their fruits ye shall know them;" because its unvarying effect is to make increasingly manifest in the thoughts and actions of its adherents the Christlike qualities which are the ideals of Christianity everywhere. It is scientific because based upon the inevitable and self-evident truth of the Scriptural declarations that God is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient good; that He made everything that was made, that He saw everything that He had made and behold it was very good; that His creation was perfect and nothing could be added to it or taken from it. The teaching of Christian Science departs not one iota from these plain and clear statements of Scripture. The "heresy" is all in the minds of those who for one reason or another persist in misstating and misrepresenting Christian Science.

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In the August issue of Grace Chronicle, the official publication...

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