Article June 2, 1917 Issue

A physician criticized Christian Science for "attempting...

Avery Coonley

Chicago Heights (Ill.) Star

A physician criticized Christian Science for "attempting of practise medicine," and said that "on that ground it was subject to criticism." Criticism by whom? Those who are healed never condemn their healing just because the doctor did not do it. If it is the doctors that are criticizing healing, it can only be because they do not do it, which would hardly be "ethical."

On the subject of medical practice I would like to quote from an editorial which appeared in the Chicago Examiner a little over a year ago under the caption "When Did Prayer Become Medicine?" "It would be interesting to learn when prayer became a drug or a lotion or a plaster. What pharmacies keep it in stock? Is it a decoction, an infusion, or a distillation? Does the druggist sell this 'medicine' in a bottle or neatly done up as a tablet or a pill? If prayer is not a 'medicine,' how can a man practise medicine by praying?"

The doctor has a very clever way of implying that those who "go to religion" to get cured had nothing the matter with them, but the facts will not bear him out. The thousands whom the doctors have pronounced incurable, and whom Christian Science has cured, refuse to have their healings "explained away" by any such device. He also said, "I do not doubt but that God could cure any disease, but I am not talking about what God can do; I am talking about what He does do," implying that God's power to heal is not exercised today. Jesus in his injunctions to heal the sick placed no time limit upon the power to fulfil them. He said such healing "signs" should follow "the that believe," and he placed no limit upon that promise. Not only was divine healing done by his disciples and his immediate followers, but God healed the sick through "them that believe," as embodied in the early Christian church for about three hundred years after the crucifixion,—indeed until the church was materialized under Constantine. Christian Science is the reinstatement of primitive Christianity (see Church Manual, p. 17) and manifests the same healing works.

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