Article April 6, 1912 Issue

The widest scope in personal freedom is the one most...

Charles D. Reynolds

Concord (N. H.) Monitor

The widest scope in personal freedom is the one most conducive to human progress. Freedom to try out in daily practice our ideals and theories indicates the line along which all progress has come and mankind has advanced. To the wide toleration that has obtained here in our America, which has given impetus and freedom to individual endeavor, is due much of the progress of this hour, and Christian Scientists are grateful beyond measure as a people for the freedom that has permitted them to prove the possibility of reinstating here in our modern world primitive

Christianity—the whole of the teachings of the Founder of the Christian religion, which as practised by him included the healing of sickness, thus proving that sickness and death are the fruits of sin.

Christian Scientists are willing that their system and work should be judged by the same standard by which other systems are judged,—its fruits. By its practical results it stands or falls. This is the standard by which Jesus said his teachings should be judged and known. The critic of Christian Science who seizes upon the death of one or more Christian Scientists and then rushes into print with dogmatic assertions in reference to the whole subject, declaring that an effort should be made to make an example of this case, without regard to the facts in their broader aspect, is allowing himself to be swayed by the same unworthy motives, the same irrational personal feelings which have characterized periods of history less enlightened than our own.

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