Article October 26, 1912 Issue

At the close of his remarks on a recently published pamphlet...

William J. Bonnin in

Rochdale (England) Observer

At the close of his remarks on a recently published pamphlet attacking Christian Science, your contributor "Observer" says that "no Christian Scientist can have any but a controversial objection to it." Permit me to say that when a Christian Scientist learns of a minister of religion misrepresenting and heaping obloquy upon what experience has convinced him to be the greatest blessing awaiting the race, and stigmatizing what is most sacred to him as a "force working ruin of body and soul," it is something more than a "controversial objection" that rises within him. What he does feel is a deep regret for such utterances, and a hope that as few as possible may be misled by them.

I cannot ask you for space to examine the statements of the author in any detail. The pamphlet is mainly extracts from the Christian Science text-book, stripped of their context, and used in an effort to show that Christian Science does not square with what the author calls "Christianity," meaning thereby his own Christianity, and hence to justify him in calling it names. The tract bears the title "What is Christian Science?" but one may search it from beginning to end without finding any attempt to answer the query. Nor does the author pretend to any first-hand acquaintance with results. And more and more is the world now growing interested in results. To be sure, our critic admits that there are Christian Scientists of excellent character, but their virtues, we are told, "are doomed to disappear" if they continue in the faith. It is nothing to him that there is not to be found in the whole huge army of Christian Scientists one who will not avow that his faith has made him a better man. It is nothing to him that a true Christian Scientist is one who by purity of motive, thought, and conduct is endeavoring to form a channel for the healing power of love to reach his brother man. He is a "monstrous heretic" and "callously cruel." It is nothing to him that there are multitudes who declare themselves to have been healed through Christian Science after all material means had failed them. It has not healed all the sick in the hospitals, so it must be a fraud, he says. One is led to wonder whether the author remembers that the Founder of Christianity and the apostles would not be left unaffected by such an argument. But perhaps the most astounding statement in the tract is one to the effect that Christian Science "repudiates healing in answer to prayer." The whole mission of Christian Science is directed to teaching one how to pray so that healing form sin and sickness may result. The secret of that prayer is knowledge of God, a scientific understanding of His omnipresence.

Our critic says that Christian Science is advancing "by giant strides." That is true, and the reason is not far to seek. In a recent number of the Nation there appeared an article over the initials H. W. N.,—initials that will carry no little weight among those who have the progress and the betterment of the race at heart,—and the writer therein describes the results of his visits to a Christian Science church, and his own observations there. The concluding passage of the article runs thus: "When we know that some tortued sufferer under a slow and incurable disease suddenly loses his fear, looks cheerfully out on life again, and goes happily on his way as though nothing ailed him; when we see a devouring sensualist choose decency as the finer pleasure, and a malignant gossip put on loving-kindness like a garment; when we feel within a community the breath of that peace which passes all understanding, and which has power to pervade even the most skeptical intelligence,—then we may begin to suspect that the age of divinity is not passed, and that miracles do really happen.

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