Article March 2, 1912 Issue

A FEW WORDS ABOUT PANTHEISM

HON. CLARENCE A. BUSKIRK

The Founder of the Christian Science movement has so effectively pointed out the unreason and the dangerous sophisms of pantheism, that there might seem to be little excuse for saying anything further on the subject. But it is possible that these words may reach the eyes of many readers who for one reason or another have not studied what Mrs. Eddy has written respecting the belief in pantheism. The notion seems to be quite extensively entertained, even by educated and thinking people who are not Christian Science students, that somehow the religious philosophy taught by Mrs. Eddy is pantheistic, and this mistaken view has been frequently affirmed and still more frequently intimated in certain religious periodicals.

The writer recalls an instance which illustrates this. A New England clergyman, a few years ago, offered to read him a short paper which had been prepared for the purpose of introducing a Christian Science lecturer. After a number of amiable remarks about Christian Scientists, the clergyman evidently deemed it his duty to try to qualify what he had thus far said by declaring that he was opposed to Mrs. Eddy's teachings because they were pantheistic. It was evident that he was a well-intentioned as well as an intelligent and educated gentleman, and on being asked where he found pantheism in any Christian Science literature, he admitted that he was not familiar with such literature at first hand, but had formed his opinion from the editorial columns of his denominational periodical. After several passages had been read to him from Mrs. Eddy's book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," he frankly expressed his surprise and chagrin, and eliminated from his paper all he had prepared on that point. In conversing with many persons the writer has been amazed at the extent of popular misconception in respect to this as well as other things which are mistakenly associated by really intelligent people with Christian Science.

There is no ground for wonderment that pantheism is such a bugbear to every Christian clergyman who is capable of logical reasoning, since it forces him into a dilemma from which he can find no logical escape except by denying either the omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence of God, or by denying that God is good and that all which He does is likewise good. This is the dilemma, indeed, of every person who affirms the reality of a material universe. Christian Science removes the dilemma, and thereby eliminates a perilous and well-worn byway to atheism. Pantheism is "the doctrine that the universe. taken or conceived of as a whole, is God" (Webster).

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