Article April 18, 1914 Issue

A sermon recently printed in your paper declared that Mrs. Eddy...

Frederick Dixon—Newcastle-on-Tyne, England

Newcastle Daily Chronicle

A sermon recently printed in your paper declared that Mrs. Eddy dropped her dictum, that matter is unreal and temporal, into an astonished world, instead of seeking, as scientists did, first to investigate the statement. I am afraid the clergyman cannot have realized, when he made this statement, where it was going to lead him. The unreality of matter is necessarily coincident with its temporality, therefore it is not necessary to trouble about that distinction. What is interesting, however, is the fact that the theory of the unreality of matter is almost contemporaneous with the history of the world, so that there should be no room for astonishment by the twentieth century of the Christian era. This teaching of the unreality of matter was preached in the East for centuries before Christ. It found its way into Europe in a very different form in the teaching of Plato; and it seems to me strange that this critic does not know that the Platonic philosophy is based on the teaching of the unreality of matter. From Greece the teaching spread westward, and was taught in medieval days in the University of Paris by Abelard, and throughout the universities of Europe by the whole body of the Conceptualist philosophers. In its modern form it was put forward by a famous bishop of the Church of Ireland, named Berkeley, and in our own times it has been taught in its latest form by a number of great Christian philosophers.

Now, the philosophy of the unreality of matter is known in natural science as idealism, in opposition to the contrary statements of materialism. Mrs. Eddy, face to face with the statements of the New Testament that "the flesh profiteth nothing," and that "they that are in the flesh cannot please God," came naturally to the conclusion that God could scarcely have created man in a form which was not only unprofitable but could not be pleasing to Him. She realized also that God is Spirit, and that man made in the image and likeness of God must be spiritual, and not material. Therefore, she arrived at the idealistic conclusion that the real universe must be spiritual, and not material. She saw, in short, that the idealism of the New Testament was not the idealism of the schools, and she found the answer to her inquiries in the pages of the gospel.

In Mrs. Eddy's efforts to arrive at a full understanding of the gospel teaching, she advanced by a process of experiment. She turned from allopathy to homeopathy, and from thence she turned to Mind itself. Gradually demonstrating every inch of her way as she went along, she ultimately put forward her conclusion in the text-book of the Christian Science movement, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." This book teaches the unreality of matter, which has been proclaimed through countless centuries; but it teaches it from an entirely different point of view from the schools, and of this fact the schools are perfectly aware.

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