Editorial October 28, 1916 Issue

The Tempter Exposed

William D. McCrackan

In naming this periodical Christian Science Sentinel, Mrs. Eddy assures us on page 353 of "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" that she intended it "to hold guard over Truth, Life, and Love." In order to further this important purpose it becomes necessary to use these pages from time to time in order to warn and to forewarn. What in a word is the summing up of all the attempts of the tempter, the adversary, the slanderer or deceiver, in regard to Christian Science? Is it not to substitute for it the term hypnotism? Is it not to induce humanity to believe a lie about the truth which makes free? The purpose of the tempter is to force upon defenseless seekers after righteousness a counterfeit will for the divine, a false self for the real man, a vagrant mesmerism for the power of pure Mind.

Jesus refuted the pretense of human will-power to be God's will when he made the superhuman declaration, "Not my will, but thine, be done." He definitely decided the controversy between the belief of mortal man power and the understanding of the Christ-power in asserting, "I can of mine own self do nothing." But Jesus had his forty days in the wilderness, when the tempter whom he unceremoniously designated as a liar argued to him in vain. This stupendous temptation of Jesus is not to be dogmatically explained, and only growth in grace can reveal its exact import; but cannot the loyal Christian Scientist already declare that what Jesus met and mastered in the wilderness was what Mrs. Eddy has unmasked in her writings as animal magnetism, at one time more generally called mesmerism and now known as hypnotism?

Every progressive Christian Scientist in learning to practise what he preaches is faced not once but constantly by the subtle reasoning which if admitted would subvert him into a hypnotist and so rob him inevitably of Christian Science. Christ and Belial cannot dwell together. Out of the darkness of evil intent there seems to be constantly fashioning itself the false suggestion of which Jesus had to complain to his contemporaries, which ascribes the works of God to "Beelzebub the prince of the devils," and which today whispers that the saving of the sinner and the healing of the sick in Christian Science is wrought by hypnotism. This deliberate deception is unmasked by the question which the Founder of Christianity proposed to his persecutors and which they were never able to answer: "How can Satan cast out Satan?"

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