Article February 15, 1913 Issue

When I first heard of Christian Science, I was not in the...

Frederick Dixon—London, England.

Academy

When I first heard of Christian Science, I was not in the slightest degree interested in it. What I believed to be its methods were as repugnant to me as were what I imagined its aims. Gradually, however, I got interested in it, and I was, I think, fair-minded enough to take the trouble to examine it before I talked about it. My early reading of Science and Health convinced me that Mrs. Eddy was saying something which I did not clearly understand, though I might superficially reject her arguments. I determined, therefore, to test her teaching, in the only fair way, by attempting to demonstrate it for myself. For two years I read Science and Health and applied its reasoning, so far as I could, to all the phenomena of daily life. To me, the result was amazing. By accepting her premise of the allness of good and the existence of divine Principle and law, I was able not merely to overcome such physical troubles as came my way, but to prove the efficacy of spiritual law over material belief generally. At the end of two years I had accumulated a, to me, vast mass of evidence, all tending to prove the fact of spiritual causation, and all demonstrating the fact that inharmony, of whatever description, could be overcome by obedience to the law of divine Principle.

Now Mr.—says, "what differentiates the Christian Scientist from ordinary people is that, in his eyes, the reason why the man (the blind man) recovered is just as much a question of fact as his own recovery." I agree entirely with the critic, and I have given my own reasons for coming to that conclusion. If he will excuse me for saying so, the reason why an individual Christian Scientist arrives at a conclusion is very much better evidence of the reliability of that conclusion than the opinion of an outsider as to the train of reasoning in other people's minds. It is an a priori argument with a vengeance to form a conclusion by assuming you know how other people, whom you do not even know, worked out their conclusions on the subject at issue.

For two years before I called myself a Christian Scientist, and for very many years since, I have been daily proving that, by the acceptance of the postulate of the allness of good, of God, it is possible not only to heal sickness, but to heal sorrow and sin, and to overcome inharmony of every sort. During all those years I have accumulated an enormous amount of evidence which proves to me that the healing of sorrow and sickness and sin, and the overcoming of all inharmony, is traceable to the fact of the existence of divine Principle and spiritual law. I do not know if this critic knows a more scientific method of arriving at a conclusion, or if he thinks that it is unscientific to regard, on this basis, the reason why a man is healed as just as much a question of fact as his recovery.

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