Article October 4, 1913 Issue

There is a great deal in a point of view

Fredrick Dixon—Ashford, Kent, England

Kentish Express

There is a great deal in a point of view. A recent critic is overjoyed because he has found a penny pamphlet which is apparently to prove the small smooth stone to strike the Goliath of Christian Science between the eyes. I, on the other hand, have seen a whole library, and a very large library, of anti-Christian Science literature published, and have never been able to discover that it has had any effect beyond introducing Christian Science to a larger public and creating a more definite interest in it. I remember a delightful instance of this, when Mark Twain published his book. A gentleman came into a Christian Science reading-room and inquired where he could find a practitioner. The librarian asked him what he knew about Christian Science. Nothing whatever, he replied, except what he had picked up from Mark Twain. The pulpit is very useful, too, and it is interesting to hear that, the cloistered seclusion of the Parish Magazine not having supplied an arena where a man may deliver an attack without fear of reply, refuge from retort has been found in the parish pulpit at Tenterden. The "no reply permitted" form of argument is not without its value as a demonstration.

The critic is angry with me, not so much for what I have said as for my having emphasized what he has said, and this is distinctly ungrateful. When he talked pathetically of the religion of "the old homeland," I only encouraged him not to be despondent, by pointing out that Christianity was not confined to the British Isles, and had not even originated there. When he grew troubled over the idea that religion could be scientific, or, as he put it, "cast iron," I merely ventured to hint that Truth was after all "cast iron," and that a knowledge of Truth was the most scientific knowledge attainable. When, all unconvinced, he produced that old familiar text, about science falsely so called, I simply pointed out that the Bible was not written in Anglo-Saxon, and endeavored to convince him that Truth is scientific, with the help of the fourth gospel and that great scholar, Dr. Westcott, sometime Bishop of Durham. When the critic, rather irritably, denounced me for trying to frighten him with Greek, I could only explain that if Wyclif, and Tyndale, and Coverdale, and the translators of the King James version had been so contemptuous of Greek, we should never have possessed the Bible of "the old homeland;" but when he went further and threatened me with the devil, I tried, out of the mouth of another orthodox scholar and churchman, almost as famous as Dr. Westcott, to get him to understand what the Bible really does mean by devil, the sole result being that the critic thunders that when a man believes a lie he believes it, a sentiment I am not inclined to question, and that "consequently all who oppose are seen through a glass very darkly," a piece of exegesis from which I entirely dissent.

At the risk of giving further offense to the critic, I am going to quote the translation of this last passage made by yet another great orthodox scholar and teacher, the latest man to do for the text of the Bible what was begun by Bede, continued by Wyclif and Tyndale, and, in the face of every discouragement, has been carried on ever since. The object of making this quotation is to show that the meaning of the great Christian philosopher, preacher, teacher, and, let me add, scientist and healer, was to impel men to take a vastly wider point of view than anything dreamed of in the philosophy of the critic,—"The things we see now are reflections from a mirror that we have to make out as we best can, but then we shall see realities face to face." What, quite obviously, Paul was endeavoring to convey, was the Christian view of the unreality of material phenomena, so unlike, though superficially so similar to, the teaching of the schools from the time of Plato to the day of Berkeley, and from the day of Berkeley down to our own times.

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