Article November 30, 1912 Issue

In the address of a clergyman, reported in your paper,...

Frederick Dixon—Stonebridge, England.

Worcestershire County Express

In the address of a clergyman, reported in your paper, there is a reference to Christian Science which is so interesting in itself that I am sure you will permit me to say something on the subject. The gentleman said, quite truly, that the Christian Scientists seemed to have gained a glimpse of the truth, while all that natural science would venture to affirm was that it had as yet no knowledge of these powers.

Now, natural science is commonly restricted by natural scientists to speculations and experiments,—confined to what are termed secondary causes or physical facts, primary causes or spiritual facts being held to be in the realm of the unknown. The pagan philosophers held much the same view of science, and in their day made use of the word miracula to denote these speculations. These discoveries were not supposed by the pagans to be supernatural, but to them they were miracula or wonders. It happened that about this time Jerome had completed his famous Latin translation of the Bible, known as the Vulgate, and in it he had quite accurately rendered the Greek words dunamis and semcion as virtus and signum. In his later writings, however, whether because he found these words failed to give the sense he intended or because he found the word employed by the philosophers was more popularly understood, he substituted miraculum for virtus as well as signum. The result in his own time was perhaps harmless enough—men knew exactly what a miraculum implied.

Gradually, however, as healing faded out of the daily practise of divine service, divine service itself came no longer to mean the common task of Christian life, but an office of the church; while the miracle, viewed in all the mystery of vanished power, was exalted to a supernatural occurrence. This critic says quite truly that the phrase "mighty works" of Jesus is a translation of the word dunamis. He might have added that the word dunamis is elsewhere translated "miracle," just as the word semeion, constantly translated "miracle," is also frequently translated "sign." The miracle, therefore, was never the supernatural intervention of God, but the divinely natural and powerful object-lesson, or sign, in proof of the teaching of Jesus, which he demanded from all his followers in the words, "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also."

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