Article January 13, 1917 Issue

A lecturer, as reported in the Journal, grants the efficacy...

Carl E. Herring—Lincoln, Neb.

State Journal

A lecturer, as reported in the Journal, grants the efficacy of Christian Science in the cure of disease, but unfortunately classifies it as due to suggestion. He divides all healing into six methods, and each method into two parts. Part one is the "momentum" which varies, but part two in each is "suggestion." These lectures were delivered in one of the principal churches, and it is presumed that the good people of that church paid to be told that their religion of faith and prayer was potentially the same as hypnotism, mesmerism, spiritualism, and mind in matter. The fact that the speaker utterly misrepresented Christian Science is not of major importance. The significant fact is that the people of a religious community are so indifferent, and religion bears so little relation to daily life, that they not only permit their neighbor's belief to be misrepresented without resentment, but in the confusion of words do not know that their own religion is being maligned and every spark of spiritual life taken out of it.

The result is, that after a pastor has spent years of honest endeavor in anchoring a moral center in a community, he and his congregation are swept off their feet by the claim of some peripatetic expounder that he can, if given free rein, destroy the religious organization of some other citizens, equally sincere, who are in their own way unobtrusively endeavoring to strengthen the moral fiber of the city. The final outcome of a campaign of this kind is to humiliate and belittle the work of the pastor, commit religion to an endorsement of methods, phrases, and doctrines totally foreign to anything the Master taught or did, shocking to the ideals of the church-membership, and a joke to the unthinking or vulgar.

So far as Christian Science is concerned, a campaign of this kind is without effect, unless it is to increase the interest and attendance at our church services; but the establishment of the kingdom of God, under whatever banner we march, is the goal toward which we are striving, and Christian Scientists cannot but deplore any movement which arrays brother against brother, makes religion a byword, and makes arrogance plethoric at the expense of the faithful servants of God who labor in humility and love for the upbuilding of His kingdom.

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