Article October 24, 1914 Issue

The sermon on "Fads," as quoted in a recent issue, is...

Frank Bell—Warren, Pa.

The Mirror

The sermon on "Fads," as quoted in a recent issue, is incomplete. It fails to hold up to deserved public condemnation the fad of considering one's own brand of righteousness to be so superior in quality as to justify one in publicly pronouncing the religious convictions of others a joke. Christian Science used to be a favorite target for such faddists, but it is not nearly so much so nowadays, for a number of reasons, one of which is the growing difficulty of finding an audience in which there is not a number of persons who have looked into the subject for themselves and are impervious to the old stock misrepresentations. Even in this enlightened day, however, there occasionally appears one with the temerity to attempt a revival of some time-worn absurdity, such as, for instance, that Christian Science "denies the existence of sickness and then turns around to cure a sickness that does not exist." The point of the query then propounded, "Is this horse-play of equestrian wit?" lies quite in another direction from that which was intended.

If it were fundamental or even an incidental teaching of Christian Science that mortals are beset with no ills from which they need relief, it could not be a fact that some thousands of practitioners are finding occupation for all their time in healing by means of Christian Science, or that a great and growing body of intelligent persons, with churches by the hundreds the world over, could be recruiting ninety percent of its members from among those healed through Christian Science of one form or another of suffering. It is estimated that in Christian Science meetings throughout the two hemispheres every Wednesday evening, five thousand oral testimonies are given by persons who have experienced the healing efficacy of this method. The weekly and monthly periodicals of the denomination regularly carry many pages of written evidence to a like effect. Is it to be assumed that these thousands of individuals turned to Christian Science because there was nothing the matter with them? To the desperately sick man what would be the appeal in a system that met his plea for help with the assertion that he should have no aid because he was quite well already? A world-wide movement could not be founded and nourished upon loving service while proclaiming that no service is anywhere required.

The plain teaching of the official literature of Christian Science is in full accord with the unanswerable logic of the facts. Sickness, sin, death, and other forms of evil, are denied reality in the realm of the spiritual and eternal, not in the material and temporal. Christian Science takes full cognizance of the presence in mortal existence of all the phenomena of false belief, though it differs from other systems in its explanation of the nature of these phenomena. The Christian Scientist stupidly ignoring evil, is a fiction of ignorance or perverseness. The Christian Scientist calm in the face of evil, awake to its false pretense, grateful for increasing immunity from its influence, and quietly but with telling effectiveness helping his fellow men toward a like apprehension—that sort of Christian Scientist is well-nigh everywhere present today, and in steadily increasing numbers.

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