Article September 17, 1910 Issue

The headmaster of Eton, and the author of the pamphlet...

Frederick Dixon—London, England.

Onlooker

The headmaster of Eton, and the author of the pamphlet to which Canon Lyttelton's endorsement in the preface alone lends any significance, have been guilty of an indiscretion. They have set out to attack Christian Science. Only success could have condoned an attack so completely gratuitous and so amazingly inept. The only success they have achieved is a succès de rire. The fact is that both of them would have been well advised to refrain from the adventure; the pamphleteer because he knows nothing at all of the subject upon which he has undertaken to enlighten all and sundry, and Mr. Lyttelton because it surely is no part of the duty of the headmaster of Eton to pant, in the character of Ralpho, at the heels of a Hudibras who is himself a practitioner of some form of mental therapeutics.

After screwing his courage to the sticking-point of throwing in his lot with the big battalions, the pamphleteer expresses his willingness to bear all the blows which his intrepidity may bring about his devoted ears. If he had been leading a forlorn hope against the bulwarks of orthodoxy he could not have "spoken fairer." Seeing, however, that he has carefully ensconced himself behind their shelter, in order to heave the largest missiles of convenient rhetoric he can find on the heads of the diminutive band of Christian Scientists below, who were not even attempting to attack him, his attitude shows a refreshing lack of humor. Nor is the headmaster of Eton to be outdone in this respect. He talks benignly of the effects of Christian Science on "semieducated people," forgetting, in the stress of his emotions, how many of these people received their education at Eton. As a matter of fact, I can assure him that Christian Scientists have been educated on very much the same lines as their neighbors, and that some of them are even quite intelligent—too intelligent, in fact, to have noticed the pamphlet in question had he not lent his name to it.

As I have stated that the author does not understand the subject which he has undertaken to criticize, it may be worth while to show categorically that this is the case. The alternative—that he does understand it—would leave him and his apologist in ethically a far worse case. He states, for example, that Christian Science healing varies from that practised by Jesus, inasmuch as the healing of Jesus was directed to men's souls, whereas that of Christian Science is directed to their bodies. In plain English, that the one aims at healing sin and the other at healing disease. If the pamphleteer had attempted to pervert what Christian Science teaches he could not have done it more glaringly. On page 150 of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy writes as follows: "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."

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