Article January 4, 1919 Issue

Your contributor asserts that "materialistic findings are...

Willard J. Welch—Onawa, Iowa

Weekly Democrat

Your contributor asserts that "materialistic findings are based on profound realities," and this can only mean that he believes in the reality of matter. Professor Fiske says: "All the qualities of matter are what the mind makes them, and have no existence as such apart from the mind." Huxley says that he had been led "to admit the sufficiently obvious truth that our knowledge of matter is knowledge of its properties, and that of its substance, if it has a substance, we know nothing." Herbert Spencer says, "Matter and motion, as we know them, are differently conditioned manifestations of force ... concretes built up from the contents of various mental relations." Sir Arthur J. Balfour says, "We explain matter by explaining it away." Plato, Abelard, Berkeley, Sir Oliver Lodge, and other great thinkers have all declared that the starting point of matter is not material but mental.

In speaking of Christian Science as "theory" this anonymous writer shows his utter ignorance of the subject. Theory is that which is yet to be demonstrated as truth. Christian Science has been demonstrated as truth in hundreds of thousands of instances. There is hardly a civilized community where some one is not to be found who will attest its helpfulness and power. Christian Science explains matter as the objectified thought of the human or mortal mind, which, as the Christian Science textbook declares on page 86, "sees what it believes as certainly as it believes what it sees." Christian Science makes a distinction between the unreal and the real, the temporal and the eternal. It declares that that only which is Godlike is real, while that which is not Godlike is unreal. Christian Scientists understand matter to be but the veil underneath which is found all of the misery which mankind suffers. They seek to lift the veil, to expose the misery for what it is, and thus to cast it out of human consciousness. There is no mystery in truth, but truth understood sets one free. Then we begin to lose fear, which is the handmaid of ignorance, or wrong thinking.

While the viewpoint of Christian Science is purely spiritual, it does not teach one to ignore disease. Even those whose thought is completely wrapped up in materiality should be able to see this. It teaches that belief in the reality of disease must be met and destroyed by knowing disease for what it is. That disease is ever destroyed proves its unreality, for whatever is real is indestructible. A mathematician does not ignore mistakes in mathematics, but he corrects them through the application of the rules governing mathematics. A Christian Scientist does not ignore disease, but heals it by the application of his knowledge of the truth about God and man and their relation the one to the other. This is thinking with God, good,—in other words, right thinking,—and can bring but one result.

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