Article September 18, 1915 Issue

If the pastor whose three sermons have been reproduced...

Frank Bell—Hazleton, Pa.

The Standard

If the pastor whose three sermons have been reproduced in recent issues of your paper believes Christian Science to resemble in any important respect the picture he has presented of it, he has my profound sympathy, for it could not be a pleasant thing to contemplate a large and growing body of one's fellow men, apparently possessed of at least ordinary attributes of judgment and common sense on other subjects, submerged in a delusion so utterly fantastic and aburd as he has undertaken to describe. Impelled by a conscientious conviction that the teachings and practices of Christian Science are such as his sermons are evidently intended to imply, and from the standpoint of a further conviction that the moral and spiritual welfare of his congregation and his community are to some extent in his keeping and that the people cannot be safely left to make their own investigations and arrive at their own conclusions in such matters, I think I can apprehend how one could speak so unkindly of one's fellow men and their religion with an intent that might seem to one to be altogether commendable.

It is because I believe the pastor to be entirely sincere that I feel the more sympathy for him. I once thought of Christian Science very much as he does, having been content with similar sources of information, and while the occasion never came for me to offer in a public way my mistaken views with regard thereto, I seized such opportunity as came in a small way privately to try to dissuade others from giving a fair test to its proffered relief from conditions of sin and suffering. Knowing what I do today of the blessing that Christian Science has brought to me and mine and numberless others, I cannot imagine a regret more poignant than would come from the realization that some one who greatly needed the help which Christian Science so abundantly bestows had been influenced, because of my misinformation on the subject, to reject the aid at hand.

Now briefly as to the statements in the third sermon, it is observed that our friend regards as conclusive the fact that two or three more or less eminent medical men say they have not found evidence that Christian Science heals organic disease, and he prefers to accept this purely negative testimony as against the mass of direct and specific evidence, such as Senator Works gave on the floor of the United States Senate last January, which included the names and addresses of persons healed of cancer, tuberculosis, locomotor ataxia, and many other diseases, with the names of the reputable physicians and surgeons who had diagnosed the cases. The official publications of the Christian Science church have printed the signed and carefully verified statements of approximately twenty thousand persons, explicitly setting forth how Christian Science has healed them, and many of these testimonies relate to the healing of organic and so-called incurable diseases.

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