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."

The simple fact is that this gentleman has misunderstood the Christian Science lecturer from his exordium to his peroration. He obviously thinks of God as a man, a phase of anthropomorphism by no means peculiar to him. Now, as Mrs. Eddy very truly says, on page 19 of "No and Yes," "what the person of the infinite is, we know not; but we are gratefully and lovingly conscious of the fatherliness of this Supreme Being." No doubt the Jews, who sacrificed doves and lambs to Jehovah, fully believed God to be a man, but there is nothing in the teaching of Jesus to support such an idea. Jesus himself, speaking to the woman of Samaria, confined himself to the use of the word Spirit, while the beloved disciple was satisfied with the word Love. One thing we can be quite sure of, that God is infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent Mind. And as man is the image and likeness of Spirit and Love, he is necessarily the image of Mind. This is the real man of whom Jesus spoke, when he said, "I and my Father are one," the man to whom he alluded when he declared to Nicodemus, "That which is born of the Spirit is Spirit is spirity." He said, however, something more than this, namely, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh." The sinning human being, filling our cities with disease and misery, is this man of the flesh; and in order to complete Jesus explanation, that he may be born again, he has to let that Mind be in him which was also in Christ Jesus. Just in proportion as he does this, does he put off the old man and put on the new.

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