Article September 21, 1912 Issue

It is a platitude of many critics, who think they know...

David Anderson—Melbourne, Aus.

Australian Farm and Home

It is a platitude of many critics, who think they know all about Christian Science, that Christian Scientists profess indifference to pain, deny its existence, and seek freedom from its thrall by trying to delude themselves that there is no such thing as physical suffering. Christian Scientists do not ignore pain or seek to deny its existence as a mortal experience. Very many to them have had long and bitter evidence that to mortal sense suffering is very real indeed; but immortal sense includes in reality only that which is God-produced and eternal. The Christian Scientist does not regard suffering as good, and as he has ceased to look upon evil as the creation of an infinitely good God, he recognizes pain as unreal in the true sense of the word—an imposture which shrinks from the light of truth, a usurper claiming title to the power and authority of the omnipotent ruler of the universe; and the Christian Scientist's belief in pain disappears in the ratio of the understanding by which he perceives God, Spirit, as All-in-all, and man, in the image and likeness of God, as spiritual, not material.

The Christian Scientist learns that, as there is no life or intelligence in matter, matter can have no sensation of its own. Inert and powerless of itself, it can neither suffer nor cause suffering. He learns that brain does not think or nerves feel, for it is through Mind alone that one thinks, or feels, or acts; and when a mortal has got away from the belief that pain is material or physical and understands that it is purely mental, he has begun to perceive something of the reality of being, in which the spiritual man of God's creating is found to be immortal and incapable of suffering; he has taken a long step in the direction of overcoming in his consciousness the mortal sense of pain; he has opened the portals of his thought to the Mind "which was also in Christ Jesus," thereby subordinating the human to the divine, and to that extent he is enabled to cast out the devil of belief in any power apart from God.

"Impracticable idealism," sneers the cynic. "Demonstrable fact," says the Christian Scientist.

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