Article April 29, 1911 Issue

It appears from the lecture delivered at Bournemouth by...

Frederick Dixon

Bournemouth (Eng.) Guardian

It appears from the lecture delivered at Bournemouth by the Rev.——,reported in a recent issue, that that gentleman has been making a tour of America, and that among the places which he visited was Boston, where he was much struck by the Christian Science church. This building, which is really a very beautiful one, seems to have started him moralizing, and his own moralizing has, I am afraid, rather run to seed, just as he urbanely says the intellectualism of Boston has in adopting the credulity born of Christian Science.

Now it is a very dangerous position to take up, that those who differ from you are, ipso facto, credulous. The Christian Science movement numbers in its ranks thousands upon thousands of educated and cultivated men and women, many of whom have obtained the highest ranks in their professions and businesses. Yet, because these people have adopted a religion from which this clergyman dissents, he dismisses them as credulous. It is very simple as an argument, but not particularly convincing.

Christian Science is at once the simplest and the sanest form of teaching that the world could possibly be asked to accept. It is so simple that the children in the Sunday School are able to understand it and apply it in their lives, and yet it is so sane that no man is asked to accept it as a mere blind belief, but only as a result of his own observation and demonstration. The key-note of Jesus' teaching was that those who believed in him would be able to do the works he did. In this way he made what has been termed the miracle, the object-lesson or test of a man's understanding of Christianity. The Christian Science church has accepted the test demanded by Jesus. It requires that its followers should not be satisfied with theories, but should take the next step and prove those theories by demonstration. There does not appear to be anything particularly credulous in this. It seems to Christian Scientists to be rather less credulous than the famous definition of faith by St. Gregory, that there is no quality of faith in accepting anything the truth of which has been demonstrated. The writer of the epistle of James distinctly states that faith without works is dead, and Christian Science teaching demands that a man should prove his faith in the twentieth century just as much as in the first century by preaching the gospel with signs following.

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