Article September 5, 1914 Issue

In a recent issue there is an interesting reference to...

Frederick Dixon

South London (England) Press

In a recent issue there is an interesting reference to Christian Science in an address by the Rev. Dr. —. It is pointed out that he insisted that Christian Science was merely a fact which the church had hitherto overlooked. A fact that has led to the formation of a new church, which has spread all over the world, which maintains a great publishing house, and issues a vast quantity of literature, including a great daily paper, surely constitutes rather a serious omission. Again, if Christian Science is simply a fact which the churches have overlooked, why do the so-called orthodox sects one and all combine to attack the movement? The fact is, that Christian Science is a restatement of primitive Christianity. It is not new, inasmuch as Mrs. Eddy never maintained it was anything but the teaching of Jesus the Christ. At the same time, it has this element of newness, that for an enormous length of time, probably from the second century, the churches have been so busily engaged in persecuting one another for not being orthodox, that they have certainly omitted much of great value. Even while this critic was speaking, a controversy was going on in the columns of The Times as to the fundamental orthodoxy of the creeds themselves, and this controversy was being waged not by people like dissenters, whom the Bishop of Oxford is not sure can claim membership at all with a Christian church, but among the bishops and deans of the Establishment and great church scholars of the universities.

If it had not been for these centuries of quarreling and of dealing out torture and persecution, the fact that Jesus' command to his disciples was to preach the gospel and to heal the sick, might not have been overlooked. At the same time, even if it had not been overlooked, it would have been found that the demonstration of healing, in proof of the truth of the preaching, required not merely faith, but a scientific understanding of divine Principle, and that this was referred to in the New Testament itself, in a Greek phrase commonly translated "knowledge of God," but which everybody knows should be translated exact or scientific knowledge of God, that is, of Principle.

Faith-healing, in the ordinary acceptance of the term, is based upon the belief that God in His infinite wisdom sends disease, which men in their ignorance request Him to remove. Christian Science teaches that infinite good cannot be responsible for evil, that the wisdom of infinite Mind cannot be improved upon by the ignorance of finite belief, and that infinite Spirit is incapable of creating infinite matter. Christian Science healing, in consequence, is no process of mental suggestion, a process which claims to be able to produce evil equally with good. It is a recognition of the scientific fact of the allness of God, good, which destroys the human ignorance that is constituted in a belief in evil. Jesus said, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." A knowledge of absolute truth necessarily frees man from a belief in ignorance. As this knowledge of the truth permeates the human mind, it necessarily destroys a belief in evil and inharmony. In this way Christian Science heals the body by first healing the mind, and in healing the mind it destroys the ignorance which is expressed in sin equally with sickness.

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