Article February 15, 1913 Issue

Nineteen hundred years ago a seemingly new idea of our...

Fort Smith (Ark.) X-Ray Bulletin

Nineteen hundred years ago a seemingly new idea of our natural relations sprang up in the minds of the people—especially the common, plain people, over there in the mountains and little valleys about Jerusalem. The shepherds attended their flocks by day and by night. They lived and loved and did even as we now do. There was perhaps more simplicity and directness in the speech and manners of the people then than now. The oppression of the rulers and the extravagance of their profligate courts was much the same then as now. But this new thought began to spread among the common people, the humble, the poor, despised, and distressed. There seemed to be healing in the words of the new Jewish Messiah that drew men unto him, and they loved him for the human sympathy that seemed a part of himself. Of course the self-sufficient, the wealthy, the proud, and the great despised the Messiah, and the rabble, as they called them, which followed and listened to his teachings. The words of the Christ were accepted literally by these plain people, and they believed on him, and there was a church founded upon his teachings.

Nearly two thousand years have passed since then. Evolution has left its mark on everything as well as upon human thought. Still, there is found today among us a devout, fast-growing band of Christian believers who accept every teaching of the new dispensation and are applying those teachings to every-day life and actions with a sublime faith in their literal efficacy and truth. These are called Christian Scientists; and they are to be found among our best educated and most exemplary citizens. They accept the Christian Scriptures as the unerring rule and guide of their faith. These are earnest citizens who, every one of them, are self-sustaining dispensers of charity and receivers of none. They are not proselyters or haranguers of the public. They have their churches and literature—a literature shown forth in their Christian Science Monitor, one of the world's greatest daily newspapers, as clean and free from immorality as any publication in the world; in fact, a beacon of cleanliness for the journalistic world. We do not pretend to understand their sublime faith, sublime in its simplicity and evident sincerity, but if these people are doing good, the world needs them and all the good they can do. They are certainly welcome here.

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