Article December 14, 1912 Issue

In the endeavor to present Christian Science as a "danger...

William J. Bonnin

Wigan (England) Observer

In the endeavor to present Christian Science as a "danger to religion," a clergyman, as reported in your paper, gave to his listeners, as Christian Science teaching, something which was not only completely foreign to that teaching but even directly antithetical to it. To "seek to distract one's mind from pain by the suggestion that the pain or the sickness does not exist" may possibly fairly describe the operations of those who seek to cure by mental suggestion, but mental suggestion is the polar opposite of Christian Science practise, and nobody with even a rudimentary understanding of that practise could possibly mistake the one for the other.

If the basic truth of Christianity, the allness and omnipotence of God, is to be maintained, it becomes nothing else than a logical, intellectual, and moral impossibility to conceive that any positive power or presence or reality is in that opposite, since it would be a contradiction of God, good. If there has been found to be "only one great reality in the universe, namely, God Himself" (these are the reported words of the Bishop of London), then the asserted reality of that which would oppose and exclude this only reality must be in truth but a seeming, a false reality; in other words, an unreality. This positive truth and necessary corollary form the central and inflexible teaching of Christian Science, but no Christian Scientist is so foolish as to urge that evil, and its ultimate expression in human experience as physical or mental pain, is anything but real to mortal. consciousness. This would be mere deception and make-believe, the endeavor to establish as true that which one believes to be untrue. It is the method of those who use mental suggestion, and the method which the critic has so erroneously supposed to be that of Christian Science.

Christian Science solves the problem by going to the root of the matter and attacking the mortal consciousness which alleges, and has induced the race to believe and to suffer for believing that there is an actual reality in evil. It is this carnal mind, at enmity with God, Truth, which Christian Science comes to evict and destroy. This mind and its beliefs are in their nature negative and unreal. They exist as a deception or a lie exists, only by virtue of those who believe it. Satan, the personified conception of evil, is but the deceiver, or as Jesus called him, "a liar, and the father of it." Now Christian Science declares the mission of Christianity to be the establishment of the kingdom of heaven by the destruction of this deception's power to deceive, and this it is accomplishing by inculcating spiritual understanding of the truth which Jesus promised should set mankind free. Truth can only free from the untrue, and understanding can destroy only false belief.

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