Article August 15, 1914 Issue

A recent writer criticizes Christian Science on the grounds...

Frederick Dixon—Lewisham, England

West Kent Argus

A recent writer criticizes Christian Science on the grounds that it is at once unorthodox and illogical. In these circumstances, I am sure you will permit me to examine the value of this contention. Orthodoxy is a mere chameleon, if ever there was one. It has changed with every century, but that has never deterred the orthodox who have just come out of the Egypt of heterodoxy, from attempting to perpetuate all the brutalities of orthodox Egypt on heterodox Philistia. Let us leave the past with its record of fagots and racks, thumb-screws and branding-irons, to the execration of history, and come for our example to the present.

If there is any point on which orthodoxy has staked its infallibility, it has been the creeds. For merely questioning the truth of these dogmatic utterances untold thousands of lives have been rendered miserable, and untold thousands sacrificed. Today the question whether the Athanasian creed shall be banished from the services of the Established Church, is deliberately argued in convocation, and the Times throws open its columns to attacks upon its use, in which the bishops who voted for its retention are criticized for attempting to make black white by proposing to limit the repetition of a lie to one Sunday in the year.

Unfortunately for the cause of dogma, it does not do to set people thinking. A letter from the bishop of Oxford on orthodoxy, in which he took up the usual position of authority toward questioners, has caused the attack to spread to the Apostles' creed. The most incisive, perhaps, of the church's controversialists, the dean of Durham, has joined the most brilliant, probably, of church scholars, Dr. Sanday, in a reply to the bishop; and their utterances are quite as caustic as those of the Hulsean professor of divinity at Cambridge, on the subject of the Athanasian creed. In these circumstances, it is a little daring of the critic to launch an attack on the orthodoxy of Christian Science, especially as Christian Science is based not upon any creed extracted from the New Testament, but on ipsissima verba of the New Testament. Jesus of Nazareth declared that those who believed on him would be able to do his works. In these words he made the criterion of a man's Christianity the extent of his ability to repeat these works. Jesus saw clearly enough that merely claiming to be orthodox was no proof of Christianity, and the writer of the epistle of James made this abundantly clear when he declared that "faith without works," assertion without demonstration, "is dead."

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