Article January 18, 1913 Issue

Few people can have done more to keep Christian Science...

Frederick Dixon—Aldershot, England.

Aldershot News

Few people can have done more to keep Christian Science before the public than Mr. Paget. In the intervals between the arduous labors of inducing an unresponsive public to regard vivisection as humane, he has always been ready to urge a forlorn argument against Mrs. Eddy's teaching. What is necessary to demonstrate the brotherly love demanded in the New Testament, is, it appears, that the church and the medical profession should engage in a "furious, hating attack" on Christian Science. He does his share. No diocesan meeting is complete without him. It is there that he proclaims the discovery of the twentieth century: "Prayer cannot reach the cells of the liver."

One of the first rules of Christian Science, this critic gravely announced, was that nothing was real except God. You might just as well insist that one of the first rules of the Church of England was that there was a Trinity. It is perhaps unnecessary to say that Christian Science teaches no such thing. It lays down as a fundamental truth the statement that the only reality is God and His spiritual kingdom. In doing this, it has on its side a better authority than the critic, namely, the fourth gospel; and if he doubts this, he had better study the works of that great scholar, Dr. Westcott, bishop of Durham. Dr. Westcott explains that the apostle draws a distinct line between "the truth" and "truth," and that he used the former to denote the actual, that which is.

Then the critic went on to say that Christian Science taught that sin, pain, disease, and death are not really real. If they are not real, they are naturally not really real. Of course, what Christian Science says is something quite different to what he says it says. It says that evil of any sort is ignorance of God, and that the ministry of Jesus was given to proving this. Jesus himself destroyed sin, pain, disease, and death, which he certainly could not have done if they had been realities of God's creating, of what Dr. Westcott points out the fourth gospel means by the absolute truth, that which actually is.

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