Article August 26, 1922 Issue

The Rev. Watten F. Evans of Claremont, New Hampshire,...

J. N. Van Patten, Committee on Publication for Southern California,

Coachella Submarine

The Rev. Watten F. Evans of Claremont, New Hampshire, is called a Christian Scientist and his book, "Primitive Mind Cure," a textbook on Christian Science. The truth is that he was a Swedenborgian minister, never was a Christian Scientist, never wrote a line of Christian Science literature. In fact, some of the followers of a movement entirely foreign to Christian Science claim him as their first author.

Without any proof whatsoever the reader is expected to accept the assertion that Christian Science healing is "mind on mind," or, as it is now called, hypnotism. If Christian Science is "mind on mind," or hypnotism, why has not the religious aspect been eliminated by those who object to it and with the mental factor alone achieve a success equal to that of Christian Science? Why not? Because "mind on mind" is not the healing power of Christian Science. And in the Journal of the American Medical Association of March 4, 1922, under the title, "Injuries to Health from Hypnosis," is the following: "Professor Siemerling, the psychiatrist of Kiel, referred in a recent lecture to the fact that injuries to health from hypnosis and suggestion are becoming of late extremely frequent. Experience does not seem as yet to offer sufficient justification for our taking up with hypnotism, a field in which exaggeration, deception, and self-deception have free play." Therefore, if after thirty years of experimentation the doctors reject the "mind on mind" method, it compels the admission that Christian Science is what it claims to be, the healing power of God. And this conviction is strengthened when it is understood that the Christian Scientist turns in prayer to the one and only Mind, God, and that it eliminates every element of the carnal mind as either a help or a hindrance to his demonstration.

The rejection of a personal devil seems to be the storm center of a large part of the attack. When the Bible sets forth and it is universally admitted by all creeds that God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient,—all power, all presence, all wisdom,—it is hardly possible to find a place for a personal devil without contradicting the Scriptures. And the further difficulty is that one inevitably runs into a whole family of devils: Mark 16:9 relates that seven were cast out of Mary Magdalene; Matthew 8:32, that a number came out of the man and ran into the swine; and the New Testament has some forty-seven references to the plural of the character whose personality it seems so vital to establish. And when Jesus' command to Satan, "Get thee hence, Satan," is offered as proving his personality, why not turn to Matthew 16:23 and settle the question? There Jesus said to Peter, "Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me." Does the sponsor of the attack declare that Peter was the devil himself? The problem of a personal devil disappears in Christian Science; but this in no way lessens the individual's necessity to work out his salvation from what devil stands for as given in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy (p. 584): "Devil. Evil; a lie; error; neither corporeality nor mind; the opposite of Truth; a belief in sin, sickness, and death; animal magnetism or hypnotism; the lust of the flesh, which saith: 'I am life and intelligence in matter.' " With this explanation it is easy, then, to understand what Jesus cast out of the afflicted people, and that they were the evil beliefs that Peter was voicing, which he rebuked in the manner customary to those times.

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