Article December 30, 1916 Issue

A lecture recently delivered in your city was ostensibly...

Samuel Greenwood

Nanaimo (British Columbia) Free Press

A lecture recently delivered in your city was ostensibly upon the subject of Christian Science, but judging by your report the lecturer must have had something else in mind, as it contains no true statement concerning this subject.

Christian Science has so many times been utterly demolished by its critics and its Discoverer and Founder declared unworthy of support, that it must seem strange to these critics to find it continuing to prosper and to afford unspeakable comfort and help to an ever increasing number of beneficiaries, just as if nothing had happened. The impartial observer will be pardoned for concluding that these same critics have expended their blows upon men of straw, images of their own creating, and have left Christian Science to go on its way untouched.

The lecturer stated that he had known Mrs. Eddy from childhood and that she was "poor and illiterate." Poor she may have been, in the sense that she was not a wealthy woman ; but illiterate, no. The fact that she derived a comfortable income from her literary work, even before her discovery of Christian Science, entirely disproves the latter claim, for newspapers and magazines do not pay illiterate people to write for their columns. In this connection let me quote from a letter by H. H. Smith, the father of Senator Hoke Smith, formerly governor of Georgia, who wrote: "I have known the Rev. Mary Baker Eddy from childhood. She is my first cousin. . . . She was always a beloved visitor in our home. . . . Her brother Albert was one of the ablest lawyers of New Hampshire; but Mary [Mrs. Eddy] was deemed the most scholarly member of her family" (The Life of Mary Baker Eddy, by Sibyl Wilbur, p. 7).

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