Article March 4, 1911 Issue

While Mrs. Eddy denies that God is personal in a finite...

Alfred Farlow

Nampa (Idaho) Herald

While Mrs. Eddy denies that God is personal in a finite or corporeal sense, she declares that God is person in the infinite sense. She confirms the Scriptural teaching that man was made in God's own image, and declares that "spiritual perception ... makes man the image of his Maker in deed and in truth" (Science and Health, p. 203).

Our critic says that "Christian Science teaches the impossibility of praying to God to deliver from sin for there is no sin, or from sickness for there is no sickness." The fact is this: Christian Science recognizes that sin and sickness exist as "beliefs—illusive errors" (Ibid, p. 343), and that they, therefore, must be grappled with and overcome in an intelligent and Christian manner, although it affirms that these errors have no divine authority and that, therefore, they have only a seeming existence. Christian Science attaches the word reality only to that which is of God and is eternal, adhering steadfastly to the Master's teaching concerning Satan and his offspring, sin, sickness, and death. Jesus declared, "When he [Satan] speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own;" that is, that which is of Satan, his offspring, his own, is a lie, a falsity. Jesus spoke of the woman whose disease would possibly be diagnosed as rheumatism in this age, as one "whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years." He taught, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free;" thus expressing the fact that deliverance from all sorts of bondage is to be occasioned by a knowledge of the truth, and thus by implication he classified all human trouble as "error."

Our critic declares that "Christian Science has no place for prayer." To be more explicit, it should have been said that Christian Science does not advocate prayer to a corporeal God, since it does not believe that God is a corporeal being, but plants itself unreservedly on the Master's statement that "God is a Spirit," and must, therefore, be worshiped "in spirit and in truth." It is quite true that after he arose from the dead Jesus was still "in the flesh," but he soon after rose above the flesh, to use Mrs. Eddy's words, "in that change which has since been called the ascension" (Ibid., p. 34).

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