Article July 6, 1912 Issue

To a Christian Scientist doctors are a body of people...

Frederick Dixon—London.

Chelsea Mail

To a Christian Scientist doctors are a body of people engaged in the attempt to mitigate human suffering to the very utmost of their ability, and I will undertake to say that it is impossible to produce a case in which a Christian Scientist has rushed into print to attack the medical profession. All that has ever been written by Christian Scientists on the subject, has been in the form of necessary replies to attacks. As a matter of fact, what I did was to state with absolute historic accuracy something of what medical practice has amounted to in the past; and anybody with any knowledge at all of history must be aware that every statement I made is incontrovertible. "Spectator's" perversion of what I said is a delightful specimen of his method of discussion. He says that I described Lord Lister as the enemy of the human race. Now what I did say, to quote ipsissima verba, was this, "Lord Lister was a great man, but he knew less than Paul, who settled the question of blood-poisoning without antiseptics at Miletus." How does that prove that I said Lord Lister was the enemy of the human race? "Spectator" might as well argue that if I had said he was a great writer, but knew considerably less than the great writer whose nom de guerre he has borrowed, I had therefore argued that he was illiterate. As a matter of fact I do consider that Paul knew more about the healing of disease than Lord Lister, for, so far as I am aware, he never raised the dead, while Paul did. Of course, this critic may argue that he does not believe that Paul raised the dead or saved himself from the serpent's bite at Miletus. That, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another story, but then it brings "Spectator" into violent collision with another critic, who I am sure would never agree to such a statement. That is the weakness of the critics of Christian Science. Like the Kilkenny cats, if I may use the simile without offense, they destroy one another.

"National English Religion Catholic," whom for short may I describe as "N. E. R. C.," has quite different views to those of "Spectator." He raises a multitude of issues which it is absolutely impossible to reply to in a letter. If an argument against Christian Science could be sustained by a series of unrelated assertions, supported by unquoted references to a book which the readers of the letter are not the least likely to have at their disposal, this critic might be said to have made out his case. But then anybody could make out a case on such lines, so that it is scarcely worth while. The Bible, which he presumably values, has been disposed of time after time, by free-thought critics, in just this way. In short, he seems to have the haziest idea of what Christian Science does teach; though it must be admitted that he appears to be equally hazy on the subject of other teaching, for his definition of Manicheism is peculiar.

What Mani did exactly teach has always been a matter of some dispute, but I will give the definition of his teaching from the greatest dictionary in the world, the Oxford dictionary: the "religious system that represented Satan as coeternal with God." The teaching of Mani probably amounted to this, that God could not have created evil, since the Bible says He created nothing that was not good. To account for evil, then, Mani evolved a second creator, Satan, contemporaneous with God. Of course this did not avoid his own difficulty in the least degree, since though the Bible says that all God created was good, it also says He made all that was made; therefore He must have made Satan, unless Satan never was made. In plain English, Manicheism made evil very real, and did this in the most determined way. It so happens, however, that Christian Science denies the reality of evil. Satan, it explains, was merely a term used by the Hebrew speakers or writers to personify the human belief in evil as a reality. The Bible, as has already been shown, distinctly declares that God made everything that was made, and made it good. Either, then, there is something God did not make, or else evil is part of God's creation, and, ipso facto, good. It was this dilemma that gave rise to Gnosticism, and the dilemma which the Gnostics presented to the early church has never been answered by orthodox theology. For, if evil is real, and spirit is imprisoned in matter, then God created evil and imprisoned spirit in matter; and in creating evil and matter made them at once real and eternal. Christian Science denies the reality of evil and the reality of matter, so that about the last charge anbody can bring against it is that of Gnosticism and Manicheism. It is evident, consequently, that this critic has either not the faintest conception of what Christian Science teaches, or he has not the faintest conception of what Manicheism was, unless, which seems quite probable, he is equally in the dark on both subjects.

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