Article December 27, 1913 Issue

Referring to a letter in a recent issue from "A Bloomington...

George Shaw Cook—Bloomington, Ill.

The Daily Bulletin

Referring to a letter in a recent issue from "A Bloomington Woman," I think her effort to prove our statements regarding the cause and cure of disease to be inconsistent, is not altogether successful. In the first place, she omits two very important sentences from one paragraph of her quotations from our former letter. We said, "Many types of disease are effects of latent fear, hereditary temperament, superstition, ignorance, or some of the generally accepted beliefs of the human mind which seem to operate as law." This was said in explanation of our previous statement that even according to Christian Science not all diseases are due to conscious fear or wilful sin. We then said: "Suppose a man is sick because of one or more of these mental causes, will drugs cure him? Is there any antitoxin that will destroy hatred, or any serum that will prevent fear?" Our critic omits these questions, which, when quoted with the context, make perfectly logical the subsequent explanation that, according to Christian Science, nothing will cure a man in these circumstances but the knowledge that God is Love and that man as the image of God can not and does not know fear or hate.

Nothing in the foregoing is inconsistent with the illustration used previously to show that according to chemical experiment many abnormal physical effects result directly from mental causes. The stumbling-block in the critic's way is doubtless her failure to appreciate the fact that we are speaking only of the relative when referring to disease and its supposed cause, whereas the statement that man is the image and likeness of God, or Love, is an absolute statement. Christian Scientists, in analyzing the nature of matter and evil as a temporal appearance, do not make a reality thereof, and know that they could not do so, for they understand, as Mrs. Eddy points out, that in reality, or in the absolute sense, "all is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation" (Science and Health, p. 468).

Christian Science makes no distinction between the so-called physical effect and the so-called human or mortal mind which causes it, but shows that one is merely the concept of the other, and that they are inseparable. It classifies the mortal mind and its phenomena as unreal in the same way that Paul did when he said, "For the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." That the objection of the present critic is not a new one, is shown by the fact that Mrs. Eddy wrote many years ago on page 346 of Science and Health: "It is sometimes said that Christian Science teaches the nothingness of sin, sickness, and death, and then teaches how this nothingness is to be saved and healed. The nothingness of nothing is plain; but we need to understand that error is nothing, and that its nothingness is not saved, but must be demonstrated in order to prove the somethingness—yea, the allness—of Truth."

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