Article January 4, 1913 Issue

The letter of a critic in a recent issue of the Telegram...

Frederick Dixon—Weymouth, England.

Evening Telegram

The letter of a critic in a recent issue of the Telegram manifests such extraordinary confusion of thought on the subject of Christian Science, that I should be obliged if you would permit me to make this clear. His sincerity and wish to state the case fairly I do not question for one moment, but he will forgive me for saying that he has entirely misunderstood the teaching he professes to elucidate. He starts with the statement that the teaching of Christian Science was before the world years previous to Mrs. Eddy's discovery. This is, of course, true, inasmuch as Christian Science is the primitive teaching of the Christian church. Regarded from that point of view it has been before the world since the beginning of the first century; but I do not think this is quite what the critic means. If he means that the churches were teaching what Christian Science teaches, this is obviously a mistake, as neither the theology nor the practise of Christian Science was taught for centuries previous to the time when Mrs. Eddy rescued the teaching of the primitive church from oblivion, and made it a practical religion, in the same practical way in which the primitive church preached and demonstrated the truth of its preaching. The simple fact that the Christian Science movement has been attacked without any restraint whatever from within the orthodox churches is sufficient proof of this. The orthodox churches repudiate the theology of the Christian Science church, and repudiate even more strongly the practise of healing contained in it. To say that the main points of the teaching have been before the world for years, and that much of it has been preached in the Church of England, is obviously absurd, and the critic goes on to make this quite clear by showing that he himself has not grasped what this

He says in the very next paragraph that Christian Scientists say that God did not make the earth or the sea, but that He did make the heavens. This will be news to every Christian Scientist. Christian Science repudiates the definition of heaven as a place; and the heavens, in the sense of clouds or whatever people may imagine them to be, can no more be dissociated from all things under them, from the earth and from the sea, than the earth and the sea can be dissociated from one another. Heaven, Christian Science teaches, is a condition of mind. It is arrived at exactly in proportion as a man attains the Mind which was in Christ Jesus. "Sin," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 196 of Science and Health, "makes its own hell, and goodness its own heaven." The conditions so produced are therefore mental.

Why, the critic goes on to ask, should Christian Science deny the reality of matter, and say that it is not God-created? The answer is extremely simple. It is, first of all, because by real, Christian Science means that which is God-created and therefore indestructible, and matter, except under analysis of materialism, is not indestructible. Then Jesus himself declared that "the flesh profiteth nothing." The Christian Scientist finds it impossible to believe that divine intelligence created something which profiteth nothing, and has to be set aside. Paul, again, wrote to the Galatians that "the flesh lusteth against the Spirit," and to the Romans that "they that are in the flesh cannot please God." To the Christian Scientist it is inconceivable that God should have created a substance which could not please Him, in order to imprison in it what the orthodox churches term the spirit.

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