Article April 27, 1912 Issue

JUDAISM AND CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

HENRY DEUTSCH.

It has been aptly said that in coming to Christian Science each arrives along the pathway which is indicated by his individual state of consciousness. Nowhere is this more emphasized perhaps than with those born and reared in the Jewish faith. To the Christian, whatever be his sect or creed, there is always an appeal in the very name of anything which suggests Christ or Christianity. It may require of him a considerable struggle to cast away the form of his particular sectarianism, but he at least retains the anchor of Christianity; time melts away very rapidly for him all mere creedal distinctions, and he can easily accept a religion which is based upon the teachings of the Master.

With the Jew, however, the situation is wholly different and practically antipodal. He comes to Christian Science, driven probably by dire extremity, for a promised or hoped-for surcease from physical ills, relief from which he has in vain sought in every other direction. What to him was a purely physical system of therapeutics very shortly becomes apparent as a religious system which contains the teachings and doctrines of one who not only was deemed an apostate to and enemy of his faith, but in whose name have been committed those persecutions which have flooded many so-called Christian lands with Jewish blood and thus associated the suffering and persecutions to which Jews have been subject with the name and teachings of Jesus the Christ. It is true that modern thought and teaching in liberal Judaism have in a degree tempered this feeling, but the fact remains that in the minds of a large proportion of the adherents of Judaism today there is still a sense of injury, injustice, and ofttimes resentment, which involuntarily produces antipathy toward anything that suggests Christianity.

Under the circumstances, therefore, it is quite natural that the Jew should approach the religious aspect of Christian Science with suspicion, and with all his mental forces and inherited tendencies arrayed against its acceptance. It is all the more wonderful that the teachings of Mrs. Eddy, so clear, convincing, and withal so demonstrable, have in hundreds if not thousands of instances obliterated unfavorable states of consciousness and demonstrated the possibility and rightness of a Jew becoming a Christian Scientist.

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