Editorial May 11, 1912 Issue

THE BETTER WAY

John B. Willis

The history of human suffering has been a continuous narration of hope and disappointment, of struggle and defeat. The instinct for freedom from pain has always been insistent; even those who have been taught to believe that suffering is a divine agency for good have never been able to resist the urgency of the illogic of their longing to escape its toils. Meanwhile, impelled by the desire to help poor humanity, many earnest men have labored heroically to discover some panacea for human ills, with the result that, as freely conceded by them, no unfailing drug remedies have ever been found.

The recognition of the inability of medical research and practice to bring surcease of suffering has recently been expressed by a physician of international reputation, a member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Naples, Italy, in a published protest that patients should not be harassed by "the doubts that beset the minds of their physicians," to whom, he says, "the empirical nature of treatment is only too obvious;" and a sufficient reason for this plea may be found in his statement that "in these days of the impersonality of force, men know that there is no power which can resist that fiat of omnipotence, natural law."

It is not surprising that one who manifestly regards disease and death as the phenomena of laws which express the "fiat of omnipotence" should be unable to offer pain-stricken men anything more encouraging than the suggestion that "when the organic chemistry of the body is understood, and missing ingredients can be supplied and noxious ones expelled; when dangerous germs are filtered from the air, etc., etc., ... then medicine will become exact, and cease to be uncertain"! It is surprising, however, that professed Christian should accept what upon its face is a practically hopeless point of view, and limit their expections of good, their hopes of freedom, to the fruitage of a philosophy which thus entirely ignores the saving Christ. To the Christian Scientist a most significant feature of this mental status is its reaction on Christian faith, its enforced thought of God as having causally to do with the multiplication of disease through the asserted laws of heredity, contagion, etc., and then hiding His ordained specifics for mortal ills so effectively that after centuries of seeking they still remain undiscovered, while the cry of suffering innocency awakens an undying echo in the heart of every philanthropist.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

ADMISSION TO MEMBERSHIP IN THE MOTHER CHURCH