Article July 18, 1914 Issue

Our critic states, "Christian Science says that prayer to...

John L. Rendall

The Fairfield (Iowa) Journal

Our critic states, "Christian Science says that prayer to God for the sick has no effect." Christian Science emphatically does not say any such thing. What Science and Health asserts is as follows: "A mere request that God will heal the sick has no power to gain more of the divine presence than is always at hand" (p. 12). On page 11 we read, "Prayer cannot change the unalterable Truth, nor can prayer alone give us an understanding of Truth; but prayer, coupled with a fervent habitual desire to know and do the will of God, will bring us into all Truth."

Now, just a word as to the "cures of Christian Science" which our critic declares are all of "neurotic, nervous, and functional cases that could have been cured without as well as with Christian Science." He says further, "There is not a single authentic cure of organic disease to the credit of Christian Science." In this statement he ignores abundant proof to the contrary. If he really wants evidence of healing by Christian Science, I will gladly furnish him with incontestable proofs that many such cases have been entirely cured by Christian Science. He who decries Christian healing, and denies that the command to heal the sick and raise the dead is binding upon Christians today, is denying the plainest teaching of Christianity that the Bible contains. If Christianity stood for anything in Jesus' time, it stood for proofs of the Messiahship through the healing of the sick. When John sent his disciples to the Master asking, "Art thou he that should come? or look we for another?" Jesus answered, "Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed," etc.

It is a sad commentary on so-called orthodox Christianity that its denial of Christian healing is sometimes accompanied by abuse of those who practise it. Jesus cared nothing for doctrines or formulated beliefs; he cared nothing for the opinion of the medical or ecclesiastical authorities of his time, but he furnished incontestable proofs of his Messiahship through his works, and for the basis of judgment as to one's Christianity he left the statement: "By their fruits ye shall know them." If it is necessary to build hospitals, to employ doctors and medicine today, it is not because the "prayer of faith" has been less efficacious, but because mankind has exchanged faith in God for faith in drugs and material means. Christian Science has come to this age as a protest against modern materialism, and it has come as did the Messiah, furnishing proofs of its essential Christianity through the healing of the sick and the reformation of the sinner. It teaches not faith in personality, but faith in the one infinite God, beside whom "there is none else."

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