Article November 13, 1915 Issue

When the great apostle to the Gentiles confronted King...

John Ashcroft—St. Louis, Mo.

The Woman's National Weekly

When the great apostle to the Gentiles confronted King Agrippa in the place of hearing in ancient Cæsarea, he summed up the incredulity of the human mind in regard to things spiritual in the trenchant question, "Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?" It is a curious illustration of the perversity of this mind that after forty years of contact with the teaching and practice of Christian Science, and despite the attestation of thousands of its beneficiaries that they have found God alone to be the healer of their diseases, it still insists that suggestion and not divine power is the agency by which this healing has been wrought.

That this mind has always sought to discredit anything tending to deprive it of its materialism and self-sufficiency, is evidenced throughout the Bible, culminating in the crucifixion of the greatest exponent of spirituality the world has ever known. The Scriptures are replete with illustrations of the effort of this mind to maintain its idols in the presence of a higher sense of things. The sorcerers and magicians who withstood Moses, the prophets of Baal who opposed Elijah, the Chaldeans who sought to destroy Daniel, were but the representatives of a condition of thought that is by no means absent from the world today, though it is known now under other guises and possibly more polite names. The entire experience of Christ Jesus and his immediate followers was marked by an ever recurring need of proving that, as Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 454), "the superiority of spiritual power over sensuous is the central point of Christian Science."

It is therefore possibly not to be wondered at that those who know nothing of the practice and teachings of Christian Science err in regarding its effects as the product of the human mind, but it is regrettable that they occasionally embody their mistaken conclusions in public utterances calculated to mislead the uninformed. That the practice of Christian Science as a remedial force rests upon suggestion, is absurd to those who have even an inkling of what Christian Science really is. There is no more suggestion in its practice than in the practice of mathematics. Both depend for their respective results upon knowledge of the truth. When Jesus told the Jews who believed on him that if they continued in his word they should know the truth and the truth should make them free, he indicated at once the nature of human bondage and the only possible salvation from it.

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