Article May 10, 1919 Issue

There are two points in your reflections regarding Christian Science...

John Ashcroft—St. Louis, Mo.

Reedy's Mirror

There are two points in your reflections regarding Christian Science, in the Mirror, that may mislead your readers. One is the implication that Christian Scientists must ignore evil to be consistent with their religion; the other, that they have suffered much from the prohibition of healing by their practitioners in various states of the Union. To deal with the latter first, let me say briefly that the practice of Christian Science healing has never been prohibited in any of the United States.

Ignoring evil is no part of the religious teaching of Christian Science, which teaches the possiblity of deliverance from evil on the basis of the unreality of evil and the reality of good. It does not concede to evil any greater reality than a mathematician concedes to an error in a problem in arithmetic. The error is not real, though the problem cannot be solved as long as it is undetected and uncorrected. The mathematician does not solve the problem by ignoring the error, nor yet by regarding the mistake as a reality. He knows that it is an error and corrects it with the truth.

Mrs. Eddy has dealt with the problem of evil in much the same way in all her writings. Always denying its reality on the basis of her understanding of the allness of God, good, she has made the demonstration of good the proof of the unreality of that which is not good. Writing in Science and Health (p. 480) she has said, "Where the spirit of God is, and there is no place where God is not, evil becomes nothing,—the opposite of the something of Spirit." Manifestly it could not become nothing, to human consciousness, if it were really something. Enlightenment could not supersede ignorance, harmony take the place of discord, the Mind "which was also in Christ Jesus" supplant the human sense of things, if these opposites were both real.

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