Article May 10, 1913 Issue

DIFFERING POINTS OF VIEW

HON. CLARENCE A. BUSKIRK.

When one finds that another is entertaining a belief which differs radically and yet honestly from his own, and that one deems it worth while to consider the reasons for the difference, it is useful to compare the points of view. In this way we may be enabled to help another, as well as not infrequently to help ourselves.

When those who have been benefited in Christian Science relate their experience, they may meet unkind criticism at times, just because the view-point of their critics is different from their own. I recall that I was once describing to an acquaintance, who was a physician (and withal a bigoted materialist, according to my point of view), a then recent experience. I related to him that I had been traveling for several weeks in two of the Gulf states where there is a wide-spread belief that people coming from a more northern latitude are quite liable to be attacked by a so-called "break-bone fever" which is too frequently fatal, and how I had been delivered from an attack of it, through the ministry of Christian Science, in three or four hours, although the prevailing belief is that one is very fortunate if he recovers in as many weeks. He listened rather incredulously from the beginning. I explained, in answer to his questions, as best I was able, that the students of Christian Science do not believe that there is anything contrary to the law of man's being in such a recovery as I had experienced, but, on the contrary, that such a deliverance from sickness, as well as from a belief in sin, is according to God's universal and eternal law. But I observed that his point of view was so stubbornly materialistic that it closed his ears to any concept of the all-power and allpresence of divine Principle; and so long as this point of view remained substantially unchanged, it is probable that all conflicting facts and evidence were rejected by him simply because they were contrary to his established habits of thought.

There seems to be a world-wide belief in the inevitable probability of a considerable percentage of railroad accidents, and that these include an inevitable percentage of fatalities. During the last eight years the writer has traveled tens of thousands of miles on railroad trains, and been in several derailments, more or less serious, but he is grateful to be able to state that no one was injured in any of them. There is much evidence in proof that students of Christian Science travel far more safely than others, and that they gain a mental equipoise which is very much to be desired. Those whose point of view is different in respect to what man is governed by, would probably declare that my deliverance in two derailments, where the coaches were badly wrecked, was a mere coincidence; the view-point of the Christian Scientist is radically theistic, and coincides with the point of view of the writer of the ninety-first psalm.

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