Article March 12, 1910 Issue

Christian Scientists have nothing but respect for those...

William J. Bonnin

Southport (Eng.) Visiter

Christian Scientists have nothing but respect for those conscientious doctors who labor so unselfishly for their fellow-men. It is upon the hypothesis that disease has a material origin, and that it is accordingly to be destroyed by material means, that medical science has undertaken its gigantic task, its interminable research and unending experiment. It is quite possible to respect loyalty and devotion to this belief as to the origin of disease and to honor the many virtues that so often go hand-in-hand with it, without subscribing to the belief itself; and that is the Christian Scientist's position. He is convinced from experience that all causation, including the origin of the phenomenon known as disease, is mental. He believes that through sin came death into the world, and, as a necessary deduction, all forms of sickness as well; that to heal sickness scientifically, in a manner to deserve the name of healing, and not of mere mending or substituting, the actual cause of the sickness must be reached, and wrong or sinful thinking give place to true thinking or knowledge. This is to let that Mind be in one "which was also in Christ Jesus," and it is in this way that God helps man to help himself.

Mrs. Eddy has written (Science and Health, p. 40), "Science removes the penalty only by first removing the sin which insures the penalty. This is my sense of divine pardon, which I understand to mean God's method of destroying sin." I read in this morning's paper that a cure for the morphia habit had been accidentally discovered. It consists in drinking every half hour a decoction of dried leaves found somewhere in the Malay peninsual. Now does the belief commend itself to any inhabitant of what the reverend gentleman calls "the kingdom of intelligence" that an all-merciful God refused to help, say, the poet Coleridge to help himself, because some obscure natives in Malay had not then chanced upon certain dried leaves and tried to make tea from them? A very great number of slaves to the drug habit have been freed through an understanding of Christian Science, and have proved the everlasting power of Truth; and though these may be told that for not preferring to trust to dried leaves from a Malayan jungle rather than to the omnipotence of the living God, they are intellectual outlaws, they are not disturbed thereat, for they have gathered the meaning of Paul's words, "Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?"

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