Article September 5, 1914 Issue

The text selected by the Rev. Mr.—for his sermon, as...

Don E. Gilman

San Diego (Cal.) Union

The text selected by the Rev. Mr.—for his sermon, as reported recently by the Union, forms a fitting basis for correction of his misstatements regarding Christian Science. Quoting from Paul's second letter to Timothy, the doctor took for a text, "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." Terming Christian Science a "strange mixture of truth and absurdity," the speaker said that it "teaches people not to use the medical knowledge and skill which God has put in their power," and that "it proceeds upon the strange assumption that the less use we make of the knowledge and the powers God has given us, the more He will come in to supply the place of them."

A strange mixture indeed, but fortunately Christian Science lays claim to no such mixture. On the contrary, its very foundation is laid in an exact, demonstrable knowledge of God, and of man in his relation to Him. It does not teach that God has given man a knowledge of medicine, but that the use of medicine and material remedies is the outcome of lack of knowledge of and trust in Him. To believe that God has endowed man with such knowledge, would be to hold Him responsible for most of the ills to which mortals are heir. If God has a knowledge of medical practice, He must as well have a knowledge of the need for its application, and sickness and death must be good, for in Habakkuk we read that God is of "purer eyes than to behold evil," and cannot "look on iniquity." To admit that God is the author of medicine, is to admit that He is the author of sickness, for we learn in Genesis that God made all that was made. Without sickness there would be no need of medicine, and to believe that God sends sickness, then endows man with the knowledge by which to overcome sickness, is to set up a kingdom divided against itself, and accuse God of being its author.

Christian Science is not a negative philosophy, teaching truth by a process of "don'ts," but is positive in its assertion that absolute reliance upon God to heal all our diseases is more efficacious than a poisonous drug, and more conducive to spiritual being. Christian Scientists refrain from using medicine because they have determined that that which is without intelligence is unable to affect them unless they are endowed with faith, and faith is a quality of mind. They therefore take the short cut and deal primarily with mind, knowing that disease is but a product of mortal or carnal mind, as the apostle Paul termed it, and is destroyed only by reliance upon divine Mind.

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