Article October 19, 1912 Issue

Mr.—'s reply to me, which appeared recently in your...

Frederick Dixon

Newcastle (Eng.) Evening Mail

Mr.'s reply to me, which appeared recently in your paper, though a fairly long one, may be said practically not to touch the question at issue. May I begin by saying that, whatever I wrote, what I intended to write was, not that the tone of this critic's earlier letter had been irritating, but irritated, and I think his present reply is ample evidence of the truth of that statement. He may be, as he says, the coolest individual his friends have ever met. What I objected to was the coolness of his assumption that Christian Scientists were necessarily a quite ignorant body of people, devoid of any knowledge of natural science or anything else.

The gentleman objects to my parallel of Mrs. Eddy's position and that of other great religious teachers. May I remind the critic of what his argument was, and what my answer amounted to? He argued that Christian Science was fantastic, on the ground that it was merely one individual's (Mrs. Eddy's) interpretation of the Scriptures. I asked him in what particular this differed from the teaching of Augustine, of Luther, of Calvin, of Fox, or of Wesley. Take Lutheranism alone. What is it but Luther's interpretation of the Scriptures; and what are Lutherans but the people who have accepted that interpretation?

The critic now replies that Mrs. Eddy's interpretation is fantastic because it differs from that of orthodox theology. I had not gathered that he was a great believer in the sanity of orthodox theology, or that he would have regarded a departure from the teaching of orthodox theology as particularly fantastic. However, accepting his change of argument, what does his new argument amount to? Was not Christianity an absolute departure from the religious teaching of Rome and Greece? Did not the philosophers of Rome and Greece regard it as fantastic? Jesus of Nazareth, the Galilean Founder of a despised religion in a remote province of the empire, was a pitiable figure enough to the Roman philosopher Celsus, while the steadfastness with which his followers preached his doctrines, and suffered for preaching them, was put aside by Marcus Aurelius himself as mere perversity. The ecclesiastics who attempted to seize Luther after his flight from Worms, regarded his teaching very much as the priests of Diana regarded that of St. Paul, and Calvin had to maintain himself in Geneva in a practical state of siege. Fox made the tour of most of the prisons of England, while Austin Dobson has sung of Wesleyanism:—

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