Article March 4, 1916 Issue

If there is one thing throughout the writings of Mrs. Eddy...

Charles W. J. Tennant—London, England

Medical Press and Circular

If there is one thing throughout the writings of Mrs. Eddy that is clear to a Christian Scientist, it is the well defined distinction she has always drawn between the absolute (eternal) and the relative (temporal). On page 300 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" she writes: "The temporal and unreal never touch the eternal and real. The mutable and imperfect never touch the immutable and perfect." A vast majority of the misunderstandings of this subject would be cleared away if the exact meaning of certain words as used in the Christian Science text-book were understood.

For instance, the Christian Scientist's use of the word real seems to cause many misunderstandings until the meaning given it by Mrs. Eddy is comprehended. She says on page 335 of Science and Health: "Reality is spiritual, harmonious, immutable, immortal, divine, eternal. Nothing unspiritual can be real, harmonious, or eternal." It is self-evident that this meaning can never be applied to sin and disease. Reality must be the condition of the eternal, and therefore can only be spiritually discerned. With regard to the material sense of things appearing real to the carnal or human mind, she writes on page 460 of the same book: "Sickness is neither imaginary nor unreal,—that is, to the frightened, false sense of the patient. Sickness is more than fancy; it is solid conviction. It is therefore to be dealt with through right apprehension of the truth of being."

In the reviewer's assumption that the universe is perfect, it is of course the spiritual universe that is meant, not the material sense of it, as he supposes. The latter's illustration of two anatomists agreeing that the human body cannot possibly be anything but perfect, is wide of the mark, for nothing material ever has been or ever can be perfect from the Christian Science point of view. Mrs. Eddy says: "All the real is eternal. Perfection underlies reality. Without perfection, nothing is wholly real" (Science and Health, p. 353). Christian Science does not teach that a perfect creation includes an imperfect human consciousness, as our critic avers, any more than mathematics teaches that the principle governing the science of numbers includes mistakes in the computation of numbers.

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