Article November 9, 1912 Issue

The account of Christian Science given in the sermon...

Frederick Dixon—Colchester, England.

Essex County Standard

The account of Christian Science given in the sermon printed in your paper is calculated to cause more astonishment to a Christian Scientist than to any one else. The statement that a Christian Science practitioner reduces a patient to a dreamy condition, and then works upon him by the repetition of a formula, is not merely the very antithesis of the truth, it is sheer imagination. Mental suggestion, no matter by whom employed, or to what end used, is vicious in its application and its results. It saps the subject's normal mental power, reduces him to subjection to another human will, and is therefore never employed for good; and so, whether intentionally or not, it is always the servant of evil.

In one form or another, suggestion is as old as the human mind, and though it has run the full gamut of the nomenclature of evil, whether as magic or witchcraft, exorcism or divining, necromancy or astrology, the method at work has always been some form of mental suggestion, based on the belief in the dual powers of good and evil. For this reason the writer of the Jehovistic document of Genesis wrote of it as the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the eating of which culminated in death, and for this reason Christ Jesus spoke of it as a house divided against a house, unable to stand.

Jesus, however, went farther than this. He pointed out that so-called healing through suggestion was casting out evil through evil, and so could only end in evil; whereas true spiritual healing lay in casting out the belief of evil through the knowledge of the omnipotence of good. In order to heal in this way, it is necessary to show the patient how to drive the belief in disease from the human consciousness, by the effort to attain the Mind which was in Christ Jesus; and how utterly impossible it is to acquire that Mind by mental suggestion from a mentality fully persuaded of the reality of sin, disease, and death, any one can surely understand.

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Jesus said, "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil," and...
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