Article September 20, 1913 Issue

The reference to Christian Science by Pastor Modersohn,...

Frederick Dixon—Bern, Switzerland

Evangelisches Schulblatt

The reference to Christian Science by Pastor Modersohn, in your issue of the 28th of June, contains a misconception of Christian Science so common that I hope you will permit me to correct it. The pastor states that Christian Scientists maintain that sin and disease have no real existence, but being only imaginary, can be dismissed by thought. His mistake lies in his failure to have mastered Mrs. Eddy's definition of the word reality. By reality, Mrs. Eddy means the spiritual creation, as opposed to the material concept of creation. Hence sin and disease, in her teaching, are not absolutely real, inasmuch as they are not God created. That they have a relative reality in human consciousness, she not only does not deny, but insists upon. It would be easy to produce innumerable quotations from her writings to this effect, but they are so numerous that a single one will probably be sufficient. On page 447 of Science and Health she writes: "To assume that there are no claims of evil and yet to indulge them, is a moral offense. Blindness and self-righteousness cling fast to iniquity. When the Publican's wail went out to the great heart of Love, it won his humble desire. Evil which obtains in the bodily senses, but which the heart condemns, has no foundation; but if evil is uncondemned, it is undenied and nurtured. Under such circumstances, to say that there is no evil is an evil in itself."

Neither does Mrs. Eddy teach that evil can be thought away. That would constitute a process of mental suggestion to which Christian Science is entirely opposed. What she does say, and this is the teaching of the great natural science idealists of the day, is that sin and disease are produced mentally, and therefore must be mentally destroyed. Inasmuch, however, as the mind which produces evil is conscious of evil, the belief in evil can only be destroyed as men let that Mind be in them which was also in Christ Jesus. In the exact proportion in which this is done, the habit of thinking evil is destroyed, and the sin and sickness which result from these thoughts are destroyed with it. In a word, the carnal mind has given place to the Mind of Christ.

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