Editorial May 24, 1913 Issue

ONE WAY

John B. Willis

The fact that Christian Science hews to the line is nowhere more clearly expressed than in Mrs. Eddy's well-known statement, "There is but one way to heaven, harmony, and Christ in divine Science shows us this way" (Science and Health, p. 242). The oneness of the way of life and health and peace, was the Master's ever recurring theme, and it is the insistence of Christian Science that the one specific for all ills is the knowledge of Christ, Truth, which subjects it to much criticism.

Impelled by the belief that there exists in the material economy, could it but be found, a cure for every sickness, physicians, with a devotion which merits a nobler quest, are ever seeking to find a serum or other somewhat which will stay the advance of disease; but while all compassionate people rejoice in any change of belief which brings relief to the despairing, many of those who have been taught to think of the material order as beneficent on the whole, and that God has provided a discoverable specific for the removal of its every incidental ill, can but wonder why an infinitely loving heavenly Father should have so effectively hidden these specifics that centuries of honest seeking have not succeeded in bringing them to light. Some may even dare to question the ideal nature of a power that could subject the creatures it has made to the rule of a law by which physical weakness is transmitted from one generation to another, thus ensuring the suffering and life-defeat of millions who in their entire innocence merit the inheritance not of foreordained evil, but of Love-ordained good. They will wonder, too, that he who came, as he said, that all men might have more abundant life, and who displayed such a profound knowledge of hidden things, should have given no hint of the nature and location of the material things which, as so many good people think, God has provided from the foundation of the world for our relief from undeserved affliction, but devoted all his time and thought to the explication and demonstration of an entirely different concept of the nature of disease and the means of its cure.

The teaching of Christian Science, though it has seemed mysterious to many Christian people, but reiterates the unequivocal statement of the Master, that sin, false belief, is the source of sickness, and that freedom therefrom is to be attained by a knowledge of Truth. This is, and must continue to be, the offense of Christian Science in the eyes of those who accept the material order as real and legitimate. The common sense of Christian people is, however, beginning to assert itself in significant ways; men are growing more positive in their conviction that wrong cannot be attributed to right, that evil does not emanate from good, and hence that God cannot be a party to that which is instantly condemned by the highest moral sense. They are questioning, too, whether the temporary relef, secured through belief in the curative power of matter, may not be purchased at too great a price. The failure of a new specific to effect the promised cure is sure to bring to some that increased discouragement which lessens the power of resistance to the ravages of disease. On the other hand, the seeming success of a new remedy always serves to intensify the reliance upon matter which practically interdicts that faith in and dependence upon Spirit which, as Christ Jesus so clearly taught, is vital to human redemption. His saying that "no man can serve two masters" was made saddeningly manifest in the loss of that spiritual power which distinguished the early Christians but which passed when their successors became absorbed in material achievement and rule.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

ONE WAY

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access