Article March 22, 1913 Issue

May I be permitted to explain what Christian Science...

Frederick Dixon—Exeter, England.

Devon and Exeter Gazette

May I be permitted to explain what Christian Science teaches? Christian Science says that pain and disease are states of human consciousness, and "states of consciousness" is the term which Huxley, and the natural scientists who agree with him, have adopted for them. This being so, Christian Science says that if these things are to be overcome, they must be overcome mentally in order to be radically destroyed. So long as the attempt to overcome them is confined to physical means, nothing can be effected beyond a tinkering with results. For this reason, Christian Science has accepted the command of Jesus of Nazareth, in which the healing of the sick was always coupled with the overcoming of sin. Jesus taught that sickness and sin were equally mental conditions, and he summed up this in the famous statement, "Whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk?" The people, however, to whom he preached seemed incapable of realizing the spiritual science he taught, owing to their intense materiality, and for this reason he told them that if they could not believe "for the word's sake," they must believe "for the very works' sake." As time went on, however, men found it easier to preach the gospel than to heal the sick. Gradually, little by little, they separated the two. They insisted that the work of reforming the sinner was the work of the church, but they equally insisted that the work of healing the body was the work of the doctor, who might be a pagan.

One of the essential things which Mrs. Eddy did for mankind was to point out the mistake of all this; to insist that there was nothing supernatural in the spiritual healing taught by Jesus, and to demonstrate the fact that this healing was a present possibility. When people began to see the healing of the first century repeated, they began, more suo, to say that Christian Scientists claimed to do miracles. Christian Scientists do claim to do miracles in the sense of the term miracle in the Bible; they repudiate utterly the claim to do miracles as some supernatural contradiction of law. Law, scientifically, is something in which no variation is possible. The mere fact that a variation has taken place proves that the fact hitherto recorded as law is not a law. The education of the centuries has been directed to the breaking of the laws imposed by the ignorance of previous generations, but each generation has bitterly repelled, in the name of common sense, the declaration that its own beliefs were not facts. The early Fathers, faced with the scientific fact that the earth turned on its axis, with contemptuous common sense produced the argument that in such a case men would periodically be walking with their heads hung down, just as the nineteenth-century doctor dismissed the stethoscope with a sneer as the "introduction of a piece of wood into the sick-room." Christian Science has had to face the type of theological intolerance which insisted that if the earth was round, the Son of man would not be seen at the antipodes when he descended from the clouds on the last day; the type of medical intolerance which dismissed the stethoscope; and the type of common-sense intolerance which insisted, like Dr. Johnson, that paving stones were real because you could stamp upon them, a declaration smilingly dismissed by Huxley as an entirely irrelevant proceeding.

In spite of this, Christian Science is winning its way. Day by day the chain of Christian Science thinkers is being wound round the world, and men are learning that the healing which was scientifically possible in the first century is equally scientifically possible in the twentieth century.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

May I be permitted to explain what Christian Science...

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access