Article April 1, 1911 Issue

Our critic does not seem to have perceived that there is...

Frederick Dixon

Blackpool (Eng.) Gazette-News

Our critic does not seem to have perceived that there is a great gulf stretched between the obvious and the literal meaning of a text. Nobody, for instance, imagines that when Paul advised the Ephesians to put on the whole armor of God he meant that they were to go in search of material armor such as Saul lent to David. On the other hand, surely nobody denies that when Jesus said those who believed on him would be able to do the works he did, he meant precisely what he said; the more so as on another occasion he declared that those who believed on him should lay hands on the sick and they should recover. The obvious meaning of these texts is that in one case the apostle was speaking of the spiritual understanding which would preserve man against all the attacks of evil, while in the other case Jesus was directing Christians in all future times and countries to prove their faith by the healing works he had accomplished. In the exact proportion in which a man puts on the whole armor of God,—acquires, that is to say, the spiritual understanding which enables him to defy evil and to prove the allness of good,—he acquires the faith which enables him, as Jesus said it would, to perform the works he had himself done during his ministry.

The day is going by when thinking people can any longer be induced to regard faith as the virtue of believign something one does not understand. Faith, the world is beginning to realize, has a more scientific basis than this, and that basis has been perfectly expressed by Mrs. Eddy, in a passage on page 297 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures": "It is a chrysalis state of human thought, in which spiritual evidence, contradicting the testimony of material sense, begins to appear, and Truth, the ever-present, is becoming understood." Just as our knowledge of the multiplicaiton table gives us faith in our ability to work out the problems of higher mathematics, so the Christian Scientist's perception of spiritual causation constitutes his faith in his ability to gain the understanding of divine Principle through which he whom Mrs. Eddy has described as "the most scientific man that ever trod the globe" (Ibid., p. 313), demonstrated by means of the miracle or objectlesson the omnipotence of divine law.

The theories of Christian Scientists are no castles in the air or houses built upon the sand. Christian Science has come to rouse the inhabitants of a world of dreams out of the spell of the senses into spiritual watchfulness. Consequently, positively the most dangerous aspect of the heresy, as a London clergyman confided not long ago to his congregation from the pulpit, is "that those who have become Christian Scientists have also become much nicer people."

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