Article March 21, 1914 Issue

The minister who has recently set forth the teachings of...

Paul Stark Seeley—Salem, Ore.

Statesman

The minister who has recently set forth the teachings of his faith through your columns, states with some show of satisfaction that the church for which he speaks has nothing new to offer in its doctrinal beliefs, and is therefore opposed to Christian Science, which, he leaves us to infer, is a religious makeshift of modern invention, unorthodox, and so of course untenable. In the testing time of the present, when thought in every direction is undergoing the most careful scrutiny, when science, dogma, and belief are being put to the test of demonstration to determine their real worth, the opposition to Christian Science based on such a premise might well look to its reason. It would better withdraw from the cloister of its own self-satisfaction, and through the light of intelligent investigation correct its warped perspective of a religion that is new only as spiritual truth is new to material belief, whether the time be measured by the Julian calendar or by that of Gregory.

The critic quotes with a tone of finality the statement of John Wesley that "anything new in religion is false." Yet we presume that neither he nor the founder of Methodism would, because it was relatively new, deny the religious truth declared by the master Christian in the words, "A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another," or the correctness of Paul's admonition to the Ephesians, that they "put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness." New, as good always is to evil, truth to error, was the Master's teaching of brotherly love and spiritual truth to the benighted sense of a world buried deep in the débris of selfishness, hatred, and sin.

Christian Science agrees with Wesley, that nothing new can be added to religious truth, a fact expressed by Mrs. Eddy in Science and Health (p. 518), where she says, "Nothing is new to Spirit." To religion pure and undefiled Christian Science adds nothing, for such is Christian Science itself. To a world asleep in the throes of belief in evil as power, in sin as indestructible, and in disease as God-ordained, it brings the message of freedom from earthly woe taught and practised by Jesus and his disciples. Through its teachings the Master's works of healing are seen to be the operation of natural, spiritual law, presently available to every individual who seeks aright. Christian Science is to the present age the call to that practical Christianity founded on a correct understanding of God and His laws as taught by the Galilean Prophet. Its only newness is the light of spiritual reality dawning in the consciousness of the individual sinner, sufferer, and agnostic, displacing sin with godliness, sickness with health, doubt with demonstrable truth, and revealing in some degree that harmonious state of existence discerned by John in Revelation and termed by him "a new heaven and a new earth."

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