Article August 9, 1913 Issue

THE LECTURES

with contributions from Lancelot Rolleston, F. C. Doane, Ira F. Thompson, Benjamin Smith, Clarence A. Buskirk, Eugene Skinkle, Edith Mossman, A. J. Gillis, Benjamin R. Jones

An audience which crowded the large hall of the Mechanics' Institution assembled to hear a lecture on Christian Science by Bicknell Young. The lecture was arranged under the auspices of the Nottingham Christian Science Society, and the chair was taken by Col. Sir Lancelot Rolleston, K.C.B., D.S.O., who in introducing the lecturer said:—

If it were not, as I understand it is, your custom to entrust this office to some one who is not of your own community, it would seem strange that I, a member and supporter of the Church of England, should have the honor to preside on this great occasion. As regards my duty to my own church, it is without the slightest hesitation that I undertake this task, for personally I hold that members of that church do well to look with sympathy and a friendly eye upon a Christian, a Protestant community which, without worldly motives or sordid aims, is striving with honest heart to seek the truth and worship God. That these are the simple aims of the Christian Science church I firmly believe. I have had, as you may know, some opportunity of judgment in this matter. I have seen that to the sick you bring relief and often health, to the faint-hearted you bring courage, to the miserable comfort and hope; and at a time when not as formerly at street corners only, but even in high places, we hear preached a doctrine of hate, you press forward uncontaminated and undisturbed in your mission of charity and peace and love.

In the jealousies and disputes which rage between the various sections into which our countrymen are so unhappily divided you take no part; disputes by participation in which the power for good of many Christian denominations is well-nigh strangled, participation from which even my own church in certain very conspicuous, but happily very exceptional cases, has of late not been entirely free. By such deplorable degradation the Christian Science church has never allowed itself to be defiled. It lives on a higher plane, it breathes a purer air; and for these reasons it is, and because we know of you nothing but what is good, that we honor you and wish you well. We wish you well because, too, we see that, perhaps most of all Christian churches, you are acting simply, unswervingly, and with a single mind in the spirit of the great message which nineteen hundred years ago, heralded by a star, came straight from heaven: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."—The Trader.

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