Article September 16, 1911 Issue

Christian Science accepts without qualification the declaration...

Frederick Dixon—London.

New Age

Christian Science accepts without qualification the declaration of Jesus that men must be born again, and it insists that this new birth only takes place as the carnal mind gives place to the Mind that was in Christ Jesus. If, however, the carnal mind is to be destroyed, the material body which is the material idea or image and likeness of the carnal mind must disappear, and the spiritual man appear. But if the carnal mind and the material body can disappear, it is because they are not the real mind or body, for that which is real is indestructible. It is here the theory of the unreality of matter emerges in Christian Science, and probably more nonsense has been talked on this subject, by people with a generous ignorance of what they are talking about, than about any other subject of interest to the world.

Christian Science is obviously spiritual idealism, and, as is the case in all idealistic teaching, it denies the reality of the phenomenon called matter. The theory has been put with complete frankness by one of the greatest chemists in Europe, a man whom the university of Oxford has delighted to honor: "Matter is only a thing imagined, which we have constructed for ourselves, very imperfectly, to represent the constant element in the changing series of phenomena. Now we begin to understand the actual—that is, that which acts upon us, is only energy, we have to ascertain by tests in what relation the two conceptions stand, and the result is without a doubt that of energy alone can reality be predicated." Now if the idealist of natural science acted logically on his premises, he would desist from the clumsy method of inducing mind to act on matter through material means. The human mind is, however, incorrigibly illogical, and the holders of these advanced theories, while declaring disease to be a mental effect, proceed to doctor it materially.

The Christian Scientist indulges in no such half truths. He declares matter to be unreal, just as the orthodox idealist, but here he parts company entirely with the idealism of the schools, and boldly accepting the idealism of the New Testament, insists that mortal mind or energy is itself unreal, and constitutes nothing but the negation of divine Mind, without whom "was not any thing made that was made." This, he insists, is the truth, the absolute scientific truth to which Jesus alluded when he said, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Free from the false evidence of the material senses, which in insisting on the unreality of matter declare sin, disease, and death to be ideas of that divine Mind which created nothing that was not good, and in speaking of which Jesus himself said, "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life."

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