Article January 25, 1913 Issue

Mr. Paget's lecture on Christian Science, reported in a...

Frederick Dixon—Aldershot, England.

Sheldrake's Aldershot Military Gazette

Mr. Paget's lecture on Christian Science, reported in a recent issue of the Gazette, though he has been delivering it now for some years, cannot be said to have accomplished much in the way intended. It is true that he has not met with all the appreciation he might in his own profession.

It was, I think, at the Diocesan Conference of Bath and Wells that this new Peter the Hermit first called on the church and the doctors to unite against the Christian Scientists. It at least showed his respect for his opponents. For every five thousand representatives of the orthodox churches, there was perhaps half a Christian Scientist, and for every five thousand believers in medical practise, another half, but he did not believe in taking chances. If he could only get the tens of thousands into the field against the units, he felt the situation might still be saved. If in some village there had come to live a lady who believed that prayer could "reach the cells of the liver," she might be routed, the united eloquence of the pulpit and the surgeons would show that this was only possible for a pill. What was wanted, cried the new Peter, was "a furious, hating attack" on Christian Science; and he went on to show the heretical tendencies of the movement, without staying to reconcile the orthodoxy of "a furious, hating attack" with the command to love your neighbor as yourself. Some one in this critic's audiences should however insist that he read Science and Health before criticizing it.

Now Christian Science teaches that God, divine Mind, is the Principle and First Cause of spiritual creation, that consequently, God and His creation constitute all reality, and the consequently mortal mind and its subjective condition, the physical universe, are simply the negation of divine Mind and its creations. This is clearly what Jesus meant when he said to Nicodemus, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit;" and it is the distinction drawn by the apostle John in contrasting "the truth" spoken of by Jesus, with Pilate's question as to mere "truth." By "the truth," writes one of the greatest scholars who ever sat on the Episcopal bench, the evangelist means the absolute truth, the actual, or that which is as opposed to the relative sense of truth conceived by Pilate.

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