Article August 6, 1910 Issue

Our critic is not quite correct, in saying that Christian Scientists...

Frederick Dixon—Newport, South Wales.

in South Wales Argus,

Our critic is not quite correct, in saying that Christian Scientists imagine "they have made a wonderful new discovery." Christian Scientists believe that Mrs. Eddy has rediscovered the method by which the primitive church accomplished its healing. They do not imagine that this discovery is an absolutely new one, inasmuch as it was contained in the teaching of Jesus. Mrs. Eddy has made this perfectly clear in Science and Health, when, in speaking of her own discovery, she writes on page 126, "The Bible has been my only authority. I have had no other guide in 'the straight and narrow way' of Truth."

The truth is that the ministry of Jesus had scarcely come to an end before his followers began to falter in the effort to obey his command, not merely in preaching the gospel, but in healing the sick. It is generally agreed that the epistle of James was written somewhere about the sixth decade of the first century, and already, in that epistle, there is the first warning of failure. "Faith," said that writer, "without works is dead." Preaching, that is to say, without healing, is of no avail. Because, as Jesus himself declared, those who believed on him would be able to do the works which he did, it follwoed necessarily that a failure to do the works implied a lack of faith. Those, he also declared, who knew the truth would be freed by that knowledge of the truth. Consequently, preaching without the works following, implied no less a lack of knowledge than it did a want of faith.

Still, though in an ever declining ratio, the healing work did linger on, for something like three centuries, till, after the time of Constantine, it ceased to be regarded as a vital element of Christian healing. Truth, however, still remained to be demonstrated, for the Christ was to be with men "alway, even unto the end of the world." The result of this was that, not even during the Dark Ages, not even in the midst of the gross materialism of the Renaissance, not even in the era of skepticism and rationalism which grew up with the Encyclopaedists, did the "still small voice" fail to make itself occasionally heard. Harding and Sebald, Luther, Fox, and Wesley, all bore witness to the power of divine Love to destroy sickness and sin. The healing, however, so established, was of the most sporadic and uncertain description, because it was based on the belief that the God to whom these men appealed was the bestower of sickness as well as health, of death as well as life. Yet death, the apostle declared, entered the world through sin, while Jesus, who healed disease and raised the dead, declared, "A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit."

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