Article February 3, 1912 Issue

THE LECTURES

with contributions from Fred S. Libby, Lewis A. Wallon, C. O. Fletcher, W. B. Connor

Tuesday night [Nov. 14] a large and representative audience of Berlin citizens was privileged to hear a most interesting lecture on a live topic of the day. The lecture, under the auspices of the local Christian Scientists, was given in the Gem Theater, and the address was by Frank H. Leonard. The speaker was introduced by Principal Fred S. Libby of the Berlin high school as follows:

Nearly two thousand years ago the shepherds and wise men came to Bethlehem to worship the child so humbly born there. This child grew in wisdom and brought to the world not a new God, but a new interpretation, a new conception of the God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. At first his interpretation of God and God's teachings was not generally accepted. No great progressive movement has ever been inaugurated without opposition, and opposition always strengthens the truth; so Christ's doctrine survived the opposition of ignorance and superstition, and lived to revolutionize the world's civilization. Not even yet, however, has the human mind with its varying degrees of spirituality been able fully to agree upon the interpretation of Christ's teachings; hence the great number of different religious beliefs and creeds. Each new belief has established itself only after strenuous opposition and criticism by the existing order of things, and each form of religion exists today because it has something in it of good, something of truth that has benefited the world.

Religious teachings, like all others, actively exist only so long as humanity feels that it is being benefited by them. When the old fails to satisfy, or fails to meet human conditions, then the new appears. About thirty-six years ago a woman, Mrs. Eddy, intelligent and more than ordinarily developed spiritually, gave to the world in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" a new interpretation of Christ's teachings, the most wonderful perhaps of modern times. Her interpretation, like its predecessors, has met with determined opposition and criticism, and because of ignorance of its real teachings it has suffered from great misrepresentation. However, it still lives and thrives; and because it lives it gives evidence that it deserves to live.

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