Article October 26, 1912 Issue

Christian Science does not teach that "there is no pain or...

Jno. M. Dean in

Memphis (Tenn.) News Scimitar

Christian Science does not teach that "there is no pain or sickness or suffering beyond the imagination," and on page 460 in Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy says: "Sickness is neither imaginary nor unreal,—that is, to the frightened, false sense of the patient. Sickness is more than fancy; it is solid conviction. It is therefore to be dealt with through right apprehension of the truth of being."

In interpreting the teaching of Christian Science in this connection the relative must be distinguished from the absolute. It is one thing to say that evil is very real to human experience and quite another thing to say that what human knowledge would insist upon as the truth of being is very far from being true or real. Relatively speaking the sun rises and sets, and this is a sense conviction based on a universal human observation, that is more than mere individual imagination. Indeed, this belief has become so fixed that even those who are thoroughly instructed otherwise involuntarily speak and think of the sun as rising and setting, but no amount of such sense testimony can shake the unalterable facts. So it is with evil of every kind. Human knowledge would say it is true, while divine understanding declares its untruth because of its destructibility. Can that which is real be touched by the mutations of time or sense? Reality is—must be—indestructible. "All things were made by him [God]," and characterized by Him as "good," and "whatsoever God doeth, it shall be forever." Hence, evil and its results are false concepts existent in universal as well as in individual mortal consciousness; they are negations of good just as darkness is the negation of light. And just as darkness is revealed as a nonentity when the light appears, so error vanishes into its native nothingness before the presence of truth. Christian Science does not destroy sin and sickness by superficially ignoring them, but by exposing their false claims and supplanting them with a right concept of God and man and things. Ignorance seems very real until dispelled by education, but when this is done what becomes of ignorance? Does it go anywhere? No; it simply disappears and that is the last of it. Christian Science is an educational process that removes former convictions which ignorance would claim to be solid realities, and this is a spiritual evolution which we believe will ultimately do away with everything that is unlike God, good.

Also let me say that in Christian Science the human mind is never given power to heal or to hurt, for all action proceeds from the divine Mind, which is but another name for God. The use of will-power or the attempt to influence the thought of another by a materially mental process, so to speak, is rank hypnotism which is not countenanced in Christian Science practise.

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