Article October 18, 1913 Issue

"Enquirer" wants to know if Christian Science has ever...

Frederick Dixon—Ashford, England

Kentish Express

"Enquirer" wants to know if Christian Science has ever healed a case of leprosy. But why leprosy? Is it that he has been reading and studying, like another critic, and has discovered that leprosy was healed in early days, according to the Bible, without drugs, and has not been very successfully encountered by the Royal College of Physicians in modern days, with drugs? Or is it merely his playful way of attempting to bring Christian Science to a reductio ad absurdum? I am no an emporium of all the cases of healing effected in Christian Science, nor would it be proper for me to drag the names and diseases of Christian Science patients into the columns of the press for the satisfaction of a correspondent too coy to sign his or her own letters. However, I have a strong suspicion that I am going to disappoint "Enquirer," by stating that leprosy has been healed more than once by Christian Science, and by citing the case of one patient, well known in his own country, who was healed and has remained healed of leprosy. This is the case referred to by "Another Enquirer" in a recent issue. The details of the case, I regret to say, are too lengthy to be included in this letter, but I am enclosing a copy of them to the editor. What will, I am sure, add considerably to "Enquirer's" satisfaction, is the fact that the patient is able to speak with some authority, being a medical man, G. W. Barrett, M.D., an active practitioner for thirty years.

Your anonymous correspondent also goes on, like jesting Pilate, without staying for an answer, to explain that when Christian Scientists do what he would have them do, that is, go and live among lepers and devote their lives to them, they will convince people of the truth of Christian Science far more than by their controversies. Here, of a surety, is "a Daniel come to judgment," but will the judge very kindly give an example of a single controversy begun by a Christian Scientist? I always imagined that it was precisely the demand that Christianity should be tried by its works and not by its words, which led to so many of the attacks of which the opponents of Christian Science invariably get so much the worst. Christian Scientists always insist that professing Christians should obey the divine command to "heal the sick," and it is precisely because they are systematically doing this, while their opponents are abusing them for it, that Christian Science has spread all over the globe. Finally, it seems a little excessive for a writer whose own standard is veiled behind his anonymity, to require a course of action which, as it was not practised by Jesus or his disciples, may be regarded as having its limitations. When "Enquirer" has read and studied, he will discover that there was something not unlike the leper settlement in the Palestine in which Jesus and his disciples lived and worked, and that they apparently did not settle there, any more than in the country of the Gadarenes. It may then dawn upon the gentleman, whose self-appointed task it is to throw stones at his neighbors for doing their best in their own way, that there was a reason for this.

Let us turn to another critic, who, like his comrade in arms, is more willing to criticize Christian Scientists than to attempt the task Christian Scientists are essaying, of preaching the gospel and healing the sick. First of all, he is bitterly annoyed because Mrs. Eddy was not an Englishwoman, and he talks pathetically of "the old home land." His study and reading do not seem to have taught him that the church of "the old home land," by its persecution, drove those who differed from it across the Atlantic, and that that was how Mrs. Eddy's ancestors came to New England. Neither does it seem to have taught him that Christianity is not a British monopoly. After all, it was the sixth century of the Christian era when Bertha and Liudhard came to Kent. The critic's pathos reminds one instinctively of the village orator, who, after listening to a lecture on the origins of the Bible, declared that the good old English in which John and Paul wrote was good enough for him.

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