Article December 2, 1911 Issue

The brief report of the Rev. E. Lloyd Jones' lecture...

William J. Bonnin

Middleton (Eng.) Guardian

The brief report of the Rev. E. Lloyd Jones' lecture attributes to the lecturer the remark that there was a great deal to be said for Christian Science, as twenty per cent of people's diseases were imaginary or mental. Taken as it stands, this remark would leave one to suppose that Christian Science was merely a process for healing the sick and adaptable only for imaginary and mental cases.

Will you allow me to state through your columans that Christian Science is a scientific interpretation of the Biblical teaching, and that it has come to this age to demostrate how any one and every one, Greek or barbarian, Jew or Gentile, may overcome evil with good. For to overcome evil with good is the end of the Christian faith, the calling of the Christian. And the contemplation of this fact immediately reveals the necessity of understanding the meaning of the terms, of knowing what we have to destroy and with what it is to be destroyed. If the fundamental Christian teaching that God is good, and omnipotent and omnipresent, is not merely a theoretical abstraction, but a truth of such a nature as to be of value and of help and worth knowing, then evil, as an unavoidable necessity, must be without power and without presence. Evil, then, must necessarily in its origin and nature be a deception. Christian Science insists on this inexorably. Another solution of the seeming problem must be found.

To restate the proposition, then, we are to destroy the deception with the truth, the false with the genuine, the unreal with the real. It is the material consciousness that tells us, on the information of the senses, that evil is real and a power, and therefore it is this consciousness that we have to deal with. Christian Science declares that this mortal, material consciousness is not a witness to truth, but is itself the dupe of the deception, and, in point of fact, part and parcel of it. Within the scope of this consciousness there are things both true and untrue, both good and evil, according to its own standard of truth. But Christian Science declares that its standard of truth is a false one, that it is merely a relative one and of no use for the testing of absolute values.

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