Article January 23, 1915 Issue

Within less than half a century Christian Science has been...

Paul Stark Seeley—Portland, Ore.

The Oregonian

Within less than half a century Christian Science has been discovered, propounded to the world, and accepted by a large number of thinking people. Advancing in the face of lay, legal, and clerical attack, it has in a comparatively few years gained the esteem of thousands. Fair play from the press and honest investigation from the unprejudiced have helped greatly to remove the misconceptions gained from careless and malicious criticism. Most pleasing, perhaps, among the signs of increasing good feeling and respect toward this youngest yet oldest of the world's religions, are the more frequent expressions of tolerance, recognition, and good will from those of differing faiths.

Occasionally, however, a critic with little knowledge of Christian Science beyond the fact that it does not accord with his own belief, looking through the lenses of ecclesiasticism or dogma, holds before his hearers his erroneous opinions of what Christian Science teaches, and batters them with attacks as futile as they are misplaced. Such criticisms are well illustrated in an interesting sermon published in the Sunday Oregonian. The clergyman there discusses the sleep of sin and the necessity for men to awaken therefrom. Dwelling upon the soporific influence of what he chose to term the "devil's opiates," he said, "Christian Science, with its denial of sin and Calvary, may have, siren-like, sung you into deep slumber." In other words, "Don't be deceived, my friends, by Christian Science, which teaches that sin is unreal and there is therefore no need to stop sinning." If any one ever tried to be a Christian Scientist on that basis, it must have been because he believed it to be anything its opponents called it, even the devil's opiate. His utter failure to find in it a sweet narcotic to still his mortal sense, could be the only consequence of his complete misunderstanding of its teachings.

The critic, like many others before him, has simply failed to grasp the difference clearly drawn by Christian Science between what exists to mortal sense, or relatively, and what exists to spiritual sense, which cognizes only the absolute and real. Sin as God-created, Christian Science denies most emphatically. Does the critic believe God creates sin and then punishes man for sinning? But this is not the full statement of its teachings, for it recognizes that in mortal existence sin is a most odious verity. Of these statements one is as necessary as the other to a correct understanding of Christian Science. Sin's elimination and destruction through an understanding of good's supremacy, is being proved to be a present-day possibility for each individual.

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