Article August 10, 1918 Issue

The sermon reported in a recent issue, considered as a...

Willard J. Welch

Creston (Iowa) Advertiser-Gazette

The sermon reported in a recent issue, considered as a whole, is a kindly and tolerant review, in brief, of church history. Both the plea for the original unity of and the protest against divisions in the church, expressed in denominationalism, are well taken. Every genuine Christian to-day deplores the divisions among Christian people as "needless and useless." The clergyman rightly attributes the cause for this to "humanism" or personality, whereas the true church rests upon Principle as opposed to personality, and has always done so.

Allow me, however, to take issue with the gentleman in his mention of Mrs. Eddy. In doing so he shows clearly that he misapprehends Christian Science and misunderstands its Discoverer and Founder. He says: "The basis of all claims to divine authority for denominationalism will give place to Joe Smith, Dowie, Mrs. Eddy, and every other person coming before the world with claims and pretensions."

The Christian Science church was not founded by Mrs. Eddy to exploit her personal opinions or to establish a personal following. It was founded to meet for world a need not being met by other agencies in the church or out of it. On page 17 of the Manual of The Mother Church we read that the Christian Science church was organized as "a church designed to commemorate the word and works of our Master, which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing." Mrs. Eddy well knew that personality and man-made creeds had no part in the simplicity of the religion taught by Jesus, and in her Message to The Mother Church for 1902 she said (p. 4), "I again repeat, Follow your Leader, only so far as she follows Christ."

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