Article July 18, 1914 Issue

In a recent issue there is printed a lecture by Mr.—...

Frederick Dixon

The Woodford (England) Times

In a recent issue there is printed a lecture by Mr.—on the subject of Christian Science. This critic is one of the people who cannot let Christian Science alone. He is perpetually lecturing and writing on the subject in a hopeless effort to stop the spread of the movement. I say hopeless, because he has never succeeded in doing anything except help to spread it. He has, on the whole, been the best advertiser of Christian Science in the United Kingdom, and nothing seems capable of lessening his industry. He began his lecture by a sort of definition of Christian Science which really on the face of it is quite meaningless, and is at any rate a hopeless parody of Christian Science. He said that it denies the reality of disease but believes in the reality of health, pleasure, and life. Certainly Christian Scientists believe health to be nearer reality than disease, and life to be considerably nearer reality than death. They also certainly believe that happiness is nearer reality than unhappiness, if that is what the critic means by pleasure. At the same time they do not believe that physical health, material happiness, or animal life is real. They believe these things to be the counterfeits of the real, and that reality is not physical health, but spiritual harmony; not death, but eternal life; and happiness not the destructible happiness of the physical senses, but the indestructible joy of spiritual perception.

This critic undertook to lecture upon Christian Science without the remotest idea of what it teaches, and he began with a fundamental perversion. If you are going to discuss Mrs. Eddy's teaching about reality, you must begin by accepting her definition of reality. That is an admission every scientific thinker in the world would lay down as an irrefutable axiom. If you like to say that Euclid described a square as a circle, of course you can reduce Euclid to nonsense. If you like to say that Mrs. Eddy described one element of the relative as relative and another element of the relative as absolute, you can, of course, make her talk nonsense, but the real nonsense is in saying that she ever made any such statement. What Mrs. Eddy says is that the only reality is divine Mind and its ideas, God and the spiritual creation. From this she draws the conclusion that material phenomena, as cognized by the human senses, are nothing but counterfeits of spiritual phenomena, just as the human senses themselves are counterfeits of spiritual perception.

Up to a certain point this is the ordinary teaching of idealism which existed thousands of years ago in the East, and has been taught in the West since the time of Plato. The ultimate difference is, however, fundamental. Whereas the idealist of the schools of natural science insists that the human mind, or energy, is the actual noumenon which produces the phenomenon, which is unreal simply because it is a phenomenon, so the Christian Scientist insists that the nonmenon, whether of mortal mind, or energy, is itself unreal, being the counterfeit of divine Mind and spiritual energy. Christian Science, then, does not in the least consist in sitting down and saying you are well when you feel ill. It consists in gaining a scientific understanding of divine Principle, and learning to demonstrate the law of this principle so as to extinguish in the human mind the various beliefs which produce a subjective condition of sin, sickness, and death.

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