Article February 26, 1910 Issue

It is fair, I think, to say that our friendly critic has based...

Frederick Dixon—Birmingham, Eng.

Weekly Mercury

It is fair, I think, to say that our friendly critic has based his objections on the idea that Christian Science accepts the theory of verbal inspiration so literally that, like a certain famous lady, it would not spare a letter of that blessed word Mesopotamia, and that on this basis it has erected a scientific castle in the air. As a matter of fact no conception could be more mistaken. The idealism of Jesus was not the idealism of a dreamer, and the ideal of Christian Science is the idealism of Jesus. The world is apt to picture idealism as a thing of "shreds and patches," the dreams and fancies of those who live tilting at windmills, or burying their heads in the sand lest they should catch sight of the facts of existence.

Christ Jesus, it has been finely said by a Christian Science lecturer, "brought the vision of the mountain down into the experience of the valley," and showed by healing the sick and feeding the multitude that he was no dreamer, but, as Mrs. Eddy has said, on page 313 of Science and Health, "the most scientific man that ever trod the globe." Idealism, from a scientific standpoint, is the antithesis of materialism, it has been defined by Huxley as the theory that "nothing exists beyond the facts of consciousness and the substance of mind." Jesus, Mrs. Eddy has written, in the paragraph just quoted, "plunged beneath the material surface of things, and found the spiritual cause," and so, on page 123, she has explained the idealism of Christian Science as the teaching which "excludes matter, resolves things into thoughts, and replaces the objects of material sense with spiritual ideas." The miracles of Jesus and the healings effected by Christian Science are the objectlessons in demonstration of the truth of the theory that all causation is spiritual. In the latter case that theory is founded on the teaching of the Bible as explained by Mrs. Eddy in the Christian Science text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," a book which is the Christian Science commentary on the Bible.

The question therefore arises as to whether the Bible is really a sort of olla podrida of myth, magic, and morals, or whether, as Mrs. Eddy insists, the world has commonly misread it, owing to its failure to grasp the fact that the text, whether in its figurative, historical, or ethical phases, is never anything but a vehicle for the conveyance of spiritual ideas. Every great book must be considered from the point of view of its own unity. In no case is this more true than in that of the Bible, the very name of which signifies that it is not the product of a single author or a single epoch, but a collection of writings gathered together to illustrate the evolution of an idea, which in this case is the spiritual progress of humanity, on what Mrs. Eddy has described as "their passage from sense to Soul" (Science and Health, p. 566). Now the fact is that the Oriental thinks and writes in metaphors as naturally as the Westerner avoids them; and as it is apparently beyond human reason to be consistent in the use of metaphor, he mixes his metaphors with an indifference which could not have been surpassed by Sir Boyle Roche himself.

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