Article May 30, 1914 Issue

A recent critic tells us that "the basal folly of Eddyism...

Frederick Dixon—Uxbridge, London, England

Middlesex and Buckinghamshire Advertiser

A recent critic tells us that "the basal folly of Eddyism is that matter is non-existent." Now the basal statement of Christian Science is necessarily not a negation, but an affirmation, namely, that "God is All-in-all" (Science and Health, p. 113). If the unreality of matter were, however, the basal folly of Christian Science, it would be a folly it has shared with the thousands of the greatest thinkers in the world who have had the misfortune to differ from our critic. It is the basal folly of the philosophy of Plato, of the whole body of the medieval Conceptualists, of Berkeley and the Berkeleians, and of Professor Ostwald and the idealists of today. Certainly some people do indulge in wild words. Modern idealism, said Mr. Balfour to the British Association, at Cambridge, has not only explained matter, it has explained it away; and he has just spent a week or more in Glasgow, in the course of delivering the Gifford lectures, in explaining what it all means. And here is a critic dismissing all these thinkers as fools in just a few words! Christian Science does differ, and differs fundamentally, from the idealism of natural science; but if this critic had wished to choose a particularly thin piece of ice through which to disappear into the waters of Lethe, he could hardly have done better than select the unreality of matter.

Finally, the critic embarks on the attempt, the deferred hope of success in which has made the hearts of so many others grow sick, of disposing of Christian Science healing. Now Christian Science healing has been practised for almost fifty years, and during that time millions of cases have been treated. It is just because of the success of this treatment that the movement has spread throughout the world and is causing the critic so much irritation today. Does he seriously suppose that all these people have been deceived by what he so politely terms people "tuning their little fiddles for a dance of death, at four shillings a visit"? Let him remember that while the Pharisees of the first century were assuring the blind man that Jesus was a sinner, that man was sending down the centuries the contemptuous rejoinder, "One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see."

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