Article February 22, 1913 Issue

"Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" is the...

David Anderson

Melbourne (Australia) Reporter

"Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" is the Christian Scientist's commentary on the Bible. It is so because he has found it more elucidating in its results than any other aid or commentary he had previously used. Probably the critic has likewise his favorite book of Biblical commentary, and a sermon with Scriptural text affixed is only the Bible with the preacher's comment; or, to use the critic's expression, "the Bible plus" the preacher. Science and Health is a metaphysical work, containing on every page statements of the absolute and the relative. To understand it, the book must be carefully studied from an unbiased standpoint, and the only way to become acquainted with it is to study it for oneself. Disagreement with its statements is conceivable, but it is just a little surprising that critics should challenge these statements without making sure that they understand them, and, on the strength of a not very thoughtful perusal of the book, should feel justified in throwing stones at those who do not accept their criticism.

The remainder of the present attack is given as an extract from a pamphlet in which Christian Science is characterized as a religion of hallucination, inconsistencies, and contradictions; a prayerless religion, and a religion without a Saviour. The last two assertions alone write down the pamphleteer as ignorant of the very ABC of Christian Science. But if one wished correctly to understand this critic's views on any subject, say, baptism, would the latter quote as authority, or commend, a pamphlet by a writer of a totally different belief, and who had no very clear knowledge of that on which he had written? The truth or error of Christian Science is not affected by opinion, and discussion centered on opinion tends only to doubtful disputation. "The hour has struck when proof and demonstration, instead of opinion and dogma, are summoned to the support of Christianity" (Science and Health, p. 342). Christian Science is a demonstrable religion, logical and practical, based on the potency of divine Love. Pulpit attacks on it do not appeal to the twentieth-century hearer. In face of such opposition it moves calmly on, adding to the number of its churches and societies with regular Sunday services at the rate of two per week.

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