Article June 10, 1911 Issue

Christian Science is indeed Science as taught and demonstrated...

Frederick Dixon

Aberdeen (Scot.) Gazette

Christian Science is indeed Science as taught and demonstrated by Jesus the Christ. "Jesus of Nazareth," Mrs. Eddy has explained, on page 313 of Science and Health, "was the most scientific man that ever trod the globe." He understood more of the Christ, of Truth, than any other man who has ever lived, and, understanding this, he understood spiritual law also more clearly than any one else, and this enabled him to demonstrate the truth of the law of that Science more fully than any other person. His teaching, therefore, was the Science of Christianity, for that teaching was summed up in his knowledge of God, his knowledge of absolute Truth. The writers of the New Testament realized this when they made use of a Greek expression commonly translated knowledge of God, but which should, of course, be translated full, exact, that is to say, scientific knowledge of God, and so of Truth. The writer of the fourth gospel recognized this, when, by a particular use of the Greek definite article, he separated absolute truth from a mere human relative sense of truth. The greatest of the medieval schoolmen perceived this when he spoke of theology, the word of God, as the only absolute Science, and declared that all others were purely relative in comparison. It is clear, therefore, that the knowledge of God is the most absolute truth that any man can attain, and something of this nature was undoubtedly in the mind of Wyclif when he translated the well-known passage in Luke, "to give knowledge of salvation unto his people," in the words, "to show science and health to his people into remission of their sins."

The natural scientist of today has a way of confining science to what he terms secondary causes or physical facts, and declaring that primary causes or spiritual facts are in the realm of the unknowable. Of course, such a definition is hopelessly unscientific, as it begins and ends by begging the question. Any one who determines that nothing can be known about primary causes is never likely to know anything, and has put himself completely outside the methods by which even all human knowledge has been acquired. If Newton had decided that nothing was to be known about gravitation, or Watt that nothing was to be learned about steam, or Darwin that evolution was an impenetrable mystery, these things would have remained so, to them at any rate. It happens, however, that there is a definition of science by Huxley which, though it is not one a Christian Scientist would endorse, our critic would not care to dispute. Science, Huxley declared, is the answer a man makes to the question, What do I know? Accepting this definition and applying it to what are termed the miracles of Jesus we arrive, on Huxley's authority, at the admission that the miracles of Jesus were the answer to what he knew. Now Jesus' knowledge was spiritual. In the words of Mrs. Eddy, in the passage already quoted from, "He plunged beneath the material surface of things, and found the spiritual cause." He came preaching to the world the gospel of the Christ, and when the natural scientists of his day shrank back to their narrow definition of science as something confined to material things, he met them on their own basis, declaring that if they could not believe for the words' sake, that is to say, if they could not understand the spiritual teaching he was giving them, they must believe for the very works' sake, they must believe for the argument of the miracles which he was working in their midst. And so he healed the sick and fed the multitude, and walked upon the water, making the miracle the object-lesson, or demonstration, of the spiritual law he was endeavoring to explain to them, and which he summed up in the words, "Ye shall know the truth,"—"the" truth, the absolute and not the relative truth, and the knowledge of the truth shall make you free,—free from your own beliefs in sin, disease, and death. This is the Science of Christianity, and, like all sciences, the truth of it can be demonstrated.

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