Article February 19, 1910 Issue

It happens that there is in the New Testament a definition...

Frederick Dixon

Central Somerset (Glastonbury, Eng.) Gazette

It happens that there is in the New Testament a definition of a Christian upon which all can agree and concerning which none can dispute, since it is the definition given by the Founder of the Christian religion. "He that believeth on me," Jesus said, "the works that I do shall he do also;" and so he made the power to heal the sick a test of a man's Christianity. It is a little remarkable that we have arrived at the time when the very body of people which has accepted the natural meaning of these words is the body chosen for exclusion from the Christian faith.

The miracle was the object-lesson in demonstration of the truth of the gospel Jesus preached. Any one who will refer to the Greek words translated "miracle" will perceive that they have not, and never have had, any supernatural meaning. Jesus himself came preaching the gospel in Galilee and Judea, and when the material instincts of his listeners rebelled against the strangeness of the spirituality of the new teaching, he fell back on the miracle, or object-lesson, with the declaration that if they could not believe for the words' sake, they must believe for the very works' sake. This is why the miracles of healing played so important a part in the spread of Christianity in the first century, and this is exactly why they are playing so important a part in the spread of Christian Science today. The actual healing of sickness is a comparatively minor object. "Today," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 150 of Science and Health, "the healing power of Truth is widely demonstrated as an immanent, eternal Science, instead of a phenomenal exhibition;" and she goes on to say: "Now, as then, signs and wonders are wrought in the metaphysical healing of physical disease; but these signs are only to demonstrate its divine origin,—to attest the reality of the higher mission of the Christ-power to take away the sins of the world." A great natural scientist of the last century defined science as the answer a man makes to the question, What do I know? The miracles of Jesus were the answers Jesus made to the demand as to what he knew of the truth which makes men free; and the healing of Christian Science is the effort of Christian Scientists to answer that question today in accordance with Jesus' requirements and his teaching.

Christian Science is the idealism Jesus preached—not halting half-way as in the theories of orthodoxy, but pushed, as Jesus pushed it, to its logical and extreme conclusion. Idealism from the point of view of natural science is the theory that physical nature is the expression of mind or force; in plain English—that matter is a mere phenomenon, and as such has no independent existence, but is, in the words of Professor Ostwald, something unreal, or only a thing imagined, which we have created for ourselves. Christian Science accept this definition so far as it goes, and demands that it shall be pushed to its logical conclusion, which is this: that sickness and disease—to take them for an instance, though material in their expression—that these are the result of mental causes, and to be healed must be healed not by searching for microbes in matter, but by the destruction of the mental germs taking expression in a sick or diseased body. A Christian Science practitioner does not, consequently, take the temperature of a phenomenon or amputate a symptom. He searches for the mental cause and attempts to destroy it by implanting in the human consciousness not a belief in the operation of physical law, but an understanding of divine law, of the truth that makes men free. To say, as our critic claims, that he does nothing for his patient, is simply to be guilty of talking nonsense. He makes a most searching diagnosis, but it is a diagnosis which has for its object the finding of the mental causes which are producing the physical results.

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