Article July 5, 1913 Issue

Considerations of space have compelled me to confine...

Frederick Dixon—Ashford, England.

Kentish Express

Considerations of space have compelled me to confine myself to negations in order to deal with the extraordinary claims and charges of the Vicar of Tenterden with reference to Christian Science. I should therefore be grateful if I might be permitted to say today something positive on the subject, so as to give your readers a true idea of its aims and teachings.

The vicar is very free in calling all humanity to witness against Christian Science. He constitutes himself, for instance, the mouthpiece of the church, and Mr. Paget, of all people, the oracle of the medical profession. This, perhaps, is not unnatural, for has not the latter announced that what is wanting to demonstrate the gospel of love and the gospel of drugs, is a "furious, hating attack" on Christian Science, to be waged everywhere by the combined forces of the vicarage and the surgery for the purpose of driving Christian Scientists out of every parish? and is not this precisely what the vicar's ordination vow has assured him is the business of the church?

Yet all members of the church and the medical profession do not seem so sure of this as are the clerical Damon and the medical Pythias. The Archbishop of York, to begin with, speaking some little time ago, asked how they were to account for the lives Christian Scientists lived. "He could only say that he had rarely met with such capacity to enter some of the deeper aspects of truth, and he had seen the lives of Christian Scientists tranquil, bright, cheerful;" while, although the vicar knows that Christian Science has never healed a case of real disease, Dr. Saleeby, a defendant in a recent cause celebre, quite lately told a London audience that "the doctors were coming to see that Christian Scientists had got hold of an important part of the truth, in proof of which there were cases, too numerous to be denied, where doctor's methods had failed and Christian Science had actually cured the patient," and in proof of this he quoted a case of the healing of "locomotor ataxy" within his own experience.

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