Article November 29, 1913 Issue

At the Anglican church congress at Brisbane Dr. Radford...

David Anderson—Melbourne, Australia

The Herald

At the Anglican church congress at Brisbane Dr. Radford once more tilted with the windmill of his misconception of Christian Science. The reverend critic is, of course, entitled to his opinion, and to express it in speech, sermon, or journalistic review, but in his representation of a subject to which he is antagonistic it is desirable that assertions regarding it should be accurate.

As in his Moorhouse lecture, our critic's paper dealt with Christian Science as a phase of ancient agnosticism, but to the Christian Scientist a thoroughly satisfactory solution of the gnostic difficulty propounded to the ancient church is found in the recognition of God, Spirit, as the only cause and creator; and the affirmations and denials of Christian Science are the absolute antithesis of the agnosticism which neither denies nor affirms the existence of a Deity. The ethics of Christian Science are the ethics of Christianity. They are not based on a disunited, albeit orthodox, scholastic theology. Christian Science stands for moralism, but it involves no mysticism. The element of Christianity which it considers vital to religion is the necessity of obedience to the commands of Christ Jesus in their entirety; and it is not perceived how this involves denial or minimizing of any element of truth.

Christian Science solves the problem of sin by dealing with it as powerless in the ever-presence of an all-powerful God. It does not join in the vain attempt to find an origin for that which is not a creation of an infinitely good God. It refuses to acknowledge any influence of the material over the spiritual. It does not regard resistance to sin as an error of the intellect, but it regards sin itself as an error of the human mind which must be resisted and overcome. So far from being a philosophy which stakes all primarily on intellect, Christian Science bases nothing on human intellect. It distinguishes between the human or carnal mind and the divine Mind. Human will, or the sensuous reason of the human mind, it regards as an idolater from the beginning, to be cast down by subordination to the Mind which was in Christ Jesus.

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