Article November 11, 1911 Issue

If there is so much Scriptural justification for sin, sickness,...

R. Stanhope Easterday

Warsaw (Ind.) Union

If there is so much Scriptural justification for sin, sickness, and misery as our critic contends, why did the Saviour spend so much of his time while on the earth eliminating such conditions from human experience, at the same time declaring that his "mighty works" were in fulfilment of the law and in direct accord with the divine will? And if, furthermore, Christian Scientists succeed in healing disease, on the basis of the denial of its reality, in the reasonable light of a wholesome faith in the reality and allness of good, while those of their brethren who so stubbornly argue for the actual existence and reality of misery are not today even claiming to be able to fulfil the Master's command to "heal the sick" as well as to "preach the gospel," is it not reasonable to concede some shadow of possibility to the Christian Scientist's views on this point?

As to the mere doctrinal points raised by our critics, these are not logically apropos, as the essentials of Christianity are easily deducible from Scripture and are provable in "signs following." Mere doctrinal points can, in the estimation of the Christian Scientist, be left to future unfoldings of infinite Truth as a part of the "many things" which the Saviour had yet to say when he left the earth. The essentials of Christian faith will be found, however, reasonably elucidated by Mrs. Eddy in the aforenamed Christian Science text-book, Science and Health. These elucidations, if read by our readers with unbiased minds, will serve to give a far different view of Christian Science to that outlined by our critics.

Conceding that Mrs. Eddy was as a child and as a young woman in poor health, our critics have entirely overlooked the fact that the Science which she discovered healed her of all this and enabled her to spend over forty years of her life in healing and regenerating hundreds of thousands of earth's sin-sick and suffering mortals, by outlining to them through her published writings that understanding of the Christ-method of spiritual healing without drugs which she deduced from the Scriptures and which first healed her. Mrs. Eddy never "charged one hundred dollars for a prayer," and she used no formulas in her healing work. Mrs. Eddy was never a spiritualist. She investigated spiritualism, along with homeopathy and numerous other religious and pathological systems, in her reasonable effort to find the truth, which she finally discovered in Christian Science after having failed to find it elsewhere.

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