Article March 29, 1924 Issue

The recent editorial in which a writer for the Boston American...

Judge Clifford P. Smith, Committee on Publication for The Mother Church, Boston, Massachusetts,

Boston American

The recent editorial in which a writer for the Boston American and other newspapers advocated a National Department of Health and denounced some of the citizens who oppose that project, furnished an apt illustration of the truism that a weak position can be neither concealed nor supported by violent words. In fact, the editorial in question, besides disclosing a marked lack of pertinent information, was not even self-consistent. The writer of the editorial explicitly said, "The public would not for a moment tolerate a law telling the people to adopt and submit themselves to treatment by any medical school, allopathic or otherwise."

In spite of this explicit statement, most of the editorial was given to an insistence upon compulsory medication. Again, the writer in question said, "A national bureau of health would be chiefly advisory, answering questions, spreading information, preventing the spread of contagious diseases." Yet the purposes thus stated are those of the existing United States Public Health Service. That is the business of an existing bureau, as shown by its annual reports and by title LVIII of the United States Compiled Statutes, 1918.

It is true that Christian Scientists entertain a different view of reality or substance than is now generally accepted by most people; but I submit to the readers of the Boston American that this fact furnishes no reason for calling them "crack-brained theorists," nor for asserting that they "amuse themselves by saying there is no disease." It is well known that Christian Scientists are not below the average of other people for either intelligence or sincerity. They are not "crack-brained;" nor are they amusing themselves when they deny that disease possesses the nature of absolute reality. They have abundant reason for concluding that Mrs. Eddy was right when she said in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 335): "Reality is spiritual, harmonious, immutable, immortal, divine, eternal. Nothing unspiritual can be real, harmonious, or eternal. Sin, sickness, and mortality are the suppositional antipodes of Spirit, and must be contradictions of reality."

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