Article April 6, 1912 ISSUE

A letter on the subject of Christian Science recently published...

Frederick Dixon—Wandsworth, London, England.

Borough News

A letter on the subject of Christian Science recently published in the columns of the News is, I am afraid, conceived on lines which have long ago been discarded by students of every school. This process of cutting sentences and phrases out of their context, and hurling them in the shape of literary brickbats at the arguments of your opponent, is simply futile, and was alluded to not long ago, by one of the great church papers, as the absured system of proof texts. By means of it you could prove the most ridiculous arguments you might like to set up, and disprove the sanest. The only indisputable fact that ever results from its employment is that, judged by it, there is not a book in the world which is not a jumble of unblushing contradictions.

To show the hopelessness of this critic's method, it is only necessary to apply it to himself. A couple of examples taken at random will suffice, but these might be continued almost indefinitely. Intent upon proving that God is conscious of evil, without apparently recognizing where this is going to lead him, the critic quotes from Amos, "Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?" he unfortunately forgets the words of Habakkuk, "Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity." Again, determined to find something to contradict in the saying that "true Christianity declares life to be eternal," he quotes a long extract from Ecclesiastes, of all books, quite overlooking the fact that Jesus himself said, "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou has sent." And yet after this the writer refers, with ill-conceived satisfaction, to the declaration in the epistle of Peter, that there are "some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction." Perhaps, as he says, "further comment is needless."

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