Article October 5, 1912 Issue

In his sermon on "Christianity and Modern Thought,"...

Frederick Dixon

Merthyr (Wales) Express

In his sermon on "Christianity and Modern Thought," reported in a recent issue, the Rev. Mr.—alludes to the "cunning craftiness" of Christian Science. I will not do him the injustice of assuming that he meant this in anything but a Pickwickian sense, but I will ask you to permit me to point out how far from the truth such an insinuation is.

For a century or more it has been the aim of certain schools of thought to reconcile the dogmas of orthodox Christianity with the theories of natural science. The effort has been half-hearted, because the designers have always hesitated to push their conclusions logically home, and the results have been meager, because the responsibility of demonstration has never been boldly accepted. Yet it must be possible to gain a knowledge of spiritual truth, at least as full and exact, in a word as scientific, as that which we possess of material phenomena. The Greek phrase which in the authorized version of the Bible is translated "knowledge of the truth," one of the most brilliant scholars in the church has shown to mean the knowledge of the absolute, or that which is; and this knowledge of the absolute is only what, in another phrase of the authorized version, is described as knowledge of God, but which should, of course, be translated, full or exact, in other words, scientific knowledge of God, that is, of Truth.

Now, it follows that the knowledge possessed by any person is necessarily a demonstrable knowledge. A man may think what he likes; but what he knows, he can prove; and Mrs. Eddy insists, most scientifically, in her book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," that, no matter what theories we may indulge in, our powers of demonstration are bounded by our knowledge. I am not going here into the distinctions of the Greek phrases, believing a person, and believing on a person. It is clear, however, that unless we are going to throw over the great scholars in the churches, while believing a person meant simply accepting a statement, believing on a person meant a realization of the actuality of a statement. When, consequently, Jesus declared that those who believed on him would be able to repeat his works, he could hardly have expressed in language more capable of scientific definition the fact that the work, or miracle, as it has come quite arbitrarily to be described, was simply the proof, or object-lesson, in demonstration of the truth of his gospel or good news. The truth is that the word miracle does not occur from one end of the Greek Testament to the other. If it had, the word would only have stood for the speculations of the philosophers of the first century. When theology calmly translated, and this only in specific places, the two words which mean an act of power and a sign, as a miracle, it was bound to go a step farther and, in defiance of the clear meaning of the gospel, make the miracle supernatural.

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In his sermon on "Christianity and Modern Thought,"...

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