Article September 7, 1912 Issue

In Old Doornfontein, at the corner of Smit and Banket...

J. H. B.—Johannesburg, South Africa.

Sunday Post

In Old Doornfontein, at the corner of Smit and Banket streets, to the west of the upper part of the little municipal park that is intersected by the tram-line, is a miniature stone-built, red-roofed church. It is chiefly noticeable for its aspect of solidity, and it is so small in comparison with most such edifices as rather to give the appearance of only a portion of a church. It is surrounded by a light iron fence that encloses tastefully laid-out beds of flowers, grass-plots, and trim little walks that look as if it would be a disturbance of their order and neatness to walk upon them. Inside, the building is simply but substantially furnished. The foundation-stone was laid March 6, 1910. This, like the greater part of the building, is of what is known as kopje-stone, which has the peculiar quality of permanently retaining and reflecting certain tints of the surroundings from which it was taken. The characteristic has its advantages and its charms, for it softens and diffuses the otherwise monotonous yellow color of the rock, and gives the impression of the mellowing hand of time.

I attended the morning service at this church on a recent Sunday. It was not without some curiosity that I did so, for as yet Christian Science is comparatively little known, and less understood, in South Africa. It is different in America, where among the white population it is a vast and ever-increasing power. In the thirty-six years that it has publicly been practised it has attracted the serious attention of about two millions of the American people. In other parts of the world it is possible that it has another million followers, who are not to be found in Europe alone,—there is a little community in any city of any size in the chief countries of the world. They are even to be found in the lonely and picturesque islands of the South Pacific. My curiosity received a pleasant shock. In my time I have had an impersonal association with various brands of religion and their practitioners. So I went to First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Doornfontein, rather prepared to meet a congregation of cranks—those weird-looking people upon a bunch of whom one sometimes stumbles, who appear to have lost something and are engaged in what they know, but will not admit, is a hopeless quest for its recovery.

I was never more surprised than when I had had ten minutes in which to study the congregation, in whose midst I was shown to a seat by a gentleman whose quiet politeness was a rebuke to the frame of mind in which I have ever attended a Christian service. For I am (or rather was) one of that vast community that, when it attends church, does so for the appearance of the thing. It is a duty. It is the correct thing. And you must go in your best clothes. And, beginning with Monday morning and ending with Saturday night, you never again think of the church. Of course there will be hundreds who will say, "Oh, but that is not my attitude." Well, I know that the hundreds who truly can say it, and of whom it is true that they are not practising a little self-deception, are in the minority. For church-going is not popular. I am not the only one who says it. You will hear it proclaimed from dozens of pulpits; you will read of it in the magazines. "How are we to reach the masses? How are we to popularize religion?" are questions that are making the parsons scratch their heads and blame the Rationalists and the Socialists, and a cheap press and the cheap education that have led the people to think for themselves. But I must get on with the congregation. Here were no cranks. Had I not known that I was among the followers of First Church of Christ, Scientist, I should have imagined that my neighbors were well-to-do Anglican church men and women. And there were pretty even numbers of men and women in the hundred or a hundred and twenty people who were at the morning service; people, too, apparently well placed as far as this world's goods go. Nothing in their attire, at any rate, to indicate austerity of manner or narrowness of spirit, in fact quite the reverse.

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