Article February 25, 1922 Issue

An address given recently at the Kewanee Public Library,...

Longley Taylor—Kewanee, Ill.

Daily Star-Courier

An address given recently at the Kewanee Public Library, as reported in your paper, implies an incomplete and therefore erroneous statement regarding Christian Scientists. I shall appreciate space for the needed correction.

Christian Scientists do not oppose vaccination for those who believe in it and want it. The efforts of the Christian Scientists who are opposed to vaccination are the efforts of citizens seeking their individual rights as guaranteed them by the Constitution of the United States of America. The statement that "the Supreme Court of the State ruled that vaccination is compulsory when there is danger of an epidemic" is also incomplete and therefore erroneous. The Supreme Court of Illinois has ruled in two decisions that there is no law to enforce vaccination upon any one who objects to it. In cases, however, where a child has been exposed to smallpox, that child may be excluded from school for a limited period of time. To enforce vaccination is a purely arbitrary and illegal act unsustained by any state statute pertaining to authority and powers of any state or local board of health.

On page 220 of "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" Mrs. Eddy says on the question of obedience to law: "I believe in obeying the laws of the land. I practise and teach this obedience, since justice is the moral signification of law. Injustice denotes the absence of law. ... Each day I pray: 'God bless my enemies; make them Thy friends; give them to know the joy and the peace of love.'"

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