Article December 3, 1910 Issue

When a gentleman uses the argument that if Mrs. Eddy's...

Frederick Dixon

Belfast (Ire.) News Letter

When a gentleman uses the argument that if Mrs. Eddy's theory is correct, every Christian Scientist ought to be able to do without food as well as drugs, and without sleep and clothes, one gathers that his power of reasoning is not particularly strong. The great teachers of idealism in natural science are today insisting that matter is unreal. One of them has expressed this in the notable phrase that matter is something we have constructed for ourselves. Presumably, our critic would argue from this that men ought to be able to construct physical phenomena to their own liking, certainly to do without food and drugs and clothes—indeed, to do without a body.

Let us examine the canon's statement, however, a little more closely. The canon's argument comes to this, that because mathematics is a science, everybody ought to be able to rival the senior wranglers, and as a matter of fact they would, if they knew enough. Now Jesus, if the analogy may be used with all reverence, was the senior wrangler of Christianity. He did do without drugs, certainly without food and sleep when he chose, and he no doubt could have got along quite as easily without clothes, if that would have done anything to decrease sin in the world. It is an extraordinary thing that our critic does not see that the ability to do without drugs and food and such things comes to a man in the exact proportion in which he acquires the Mind which was in Christ Jesus, for it was the Mind of Christ which enabled Jesus to do all that he did do.

Christian Scientists do not go to meetings to mock the members of other Christian sects for not being better than they are, any more than they claim to be better than their neighbors. They do claim emphatically that they are better than they themselves used to be in the past, and in their daily struggle to let that Mind be in them which was also in Christ Jesus, they have at all events reached the point when they can do without drugs, and even food and sleep are much less important to them than they once were. The day may come when they will have sufficiently grown in the stature of Christ to be able to do without food and without sleep, but it is extremely doubtful if the time will come when there will be anything to be gained by Christianity being expressed by men not wearing clothes. There is nothing in the teaching of Jesus to make any one think this probable, and it is the object of Christian Scientists to walk in his footsteps. The reasoning of our critic is not to be particularly admired from any point of view, though it seems to have moved some of his colleagues to laughter.

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