Article March 3, 1917 Issue

Our critic thinks that Christian Science is false and dangerous;...

Thorwald Siegfried

Bothell (Wash.) Sentinel

Our critic thinks that Christian Science is false and dangerous; but when he attempts to prove his opinion to be true by stating that Christian Science is the foe of the home and of society he asserts that which is not true. Christian Scientists are proud of the fact that the effect of Christian Science is to make its adherents more law abiding, chaste, and affectionate. Many a family owes the preservation of its home to the regeneration of the husband and father in Christian Science, and if all classes of people gave the courts as little trouble as Christian Scientists do, litigation would be decreasing instead of increasing.

The further statement that the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy, is "the Bible of the Christian Science churches" is utterly false. The fact is, that in the Sunday services in all Christian Science churches probably more than half of the words spoken are from the King James Version of the Bible; the citations to these readings are published months in advance in The Christian Science Quarterly and are studied by Christian Scientists during the week before their delivery in church, so that they are thoroughly understood and applied in daily life. Far from making it possible for Christian Scientists to misinterpret the Bible, as your correspondent charges, it enables them to understand the Bible in its primitive simplicity, unencumbered by the mass of superstition which has grown up in the minds of people through accepting ecclesiastical opinion about the Bible, instead of the Bible itself, as law.

A good example of ministers advancing their own opinion and claiming it to be taught by the Bible is this clergyman's statement, "There is nothing that the Bible lays more stress on than the reality of sin, and it was Christ's chief aim in the world to save sinners." Now, of course the work of Christ Jesus was designed to save sinners, and Christian Scientists will agree with that much of the statement. But the reality of sin is not the chief teaching of the Bible; on the contrary, the record is that "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." Evil to be real must have been created by God, in which case Jesus would be found undoing God's work; whereas in truth Jesus' ability to undo sin grew out of his knowledge that sin is not created by God and therefore is powerful only as it deceives us into believing it to be God-created and real.

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