In a recent issue an evangelist is reported to have said,...

Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise

In a recent issue an evangelist is reported to have said, while conducting a revival service in Beaumont: "Mary Baker Eddy believed there is no hell." Inasmuch as the statement in the paper is separated from its context, we have no means of knowing just what the speaker's concept of hell is, and consequently what thought he meant to convey to his hearers. To say that Mrs. Eddy believed there is no hell, is unjust to her and to the Christian Science movement; it is wholly false and untrue; and one informed as to her life history and teachings would not have delivered such an utterance. A number of references to hell are made by Mrs. Eddy in her writings, and her position is always Scriptural. The hell she pictures is the same miserable, sinful mental state mentioned in the gospels and elsewhere in the Bible.

In an address in 1904 on the occasion of the dedication of the church in Concord, N. H., Mrs. Eddy says, "I am asked, 'Is there a hell?" And her answer in part is, "Yes, there is a hell for all who persist in breaking the Golden Rule, or in disobeying the commandments of God" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 160). Mrs. Eddy, with the Bible, teaches that hidden, unpunished sin is hell,—even the hell of a "guilty conscience waking to a true sense of itself, and burning in torture until the sinner is consumed, his sins destroyed." On page 196 of Science and Health we read that "sin makes its own hell, and goodness its own heaven," and on page 266, "The sinner makes his own hell by doing evil, and the saint his own heaven by doing right," while the Scripture says, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

The leading thinkers and scholars of today, both among theologians and scientific men, hold that hell—the effects of wrong thinking and wrong doing—is mental torment, anguish; and that one can be in such a state here as well as after the transition called death. If the critic believes in a place where a flame of literal fire is fed by material substances, and in which the souls of the departed who failed while here to make peace with God, are burned eternally; if this is what he means when he says, "Mary Baker Eddy believed there is no hell,"—he is correct; for the writer is quite sure Mrs. Eddy had no such conception of hell. She taught that the sinner is punished—is in hell—so long as he sins or believes in sin. "Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing."

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