Article June 28, 1924 Issue

Permit me to present to your readers a different version...

James M. Stevens, Committee on Publication for the State of Minnesota,—Minneapolis

News-Tribune

Permit me to present to your readers a different version of Luke's Christian ministry than the one advanced by the minister whose sermon is reported in your paper, and also to correct the wrong impression which his assertion tends to create relative to Christian Science. The Bible does not indicate that Luke followed the practice of material medicine after becoming interested in Christianity. In fact, if it is to be accepted that he is the author of the gospel of Luke, and of the Acts, the evidence all points to the conclusion that he did not practice materia medica after becoming converted to Christianity. In the fourth chapter of the gospel of Luke he writes: "And Simon's wife's mother was taken with a great fever; and they besought him [Jesus] for her. And he stood over her, and rebuked the fever; and it left her: and immediately she arose and ministered unto them." Again, in the next chapter: "And it came to pass, when he was in a certain city, behold a man full of leprosy: who seeing Jesus fell on his face, and besought him, saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. And he put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will: be thou clean. And immediately the leprosy departed from him." With the knowledge of these and the many other healings by Jesus, which he so sympathetically records in his gospel, and the many wonderful healings and deliverances from peril of which he, in his personal association with Paul and the other followers of Jesus, must have had intimate knowledge, is it not inconceivable that he should still adhere to the old and ineffectual method of material healing?

Ia it not more probable that Luke's espousal of the Christian religion caused him to change his methods of healing, rather than that he tried to take his old healing system into the religion he had espoused? The following quotation from Harnack would seem to bear out this position: "He [Luke] embraced that religion in the conviction that by its means and by quite new methods he would be enabled to heal diseases and to drive out evil spirits, and above all to become an effectual physician of the soul." When one takes into consideration that the early Christian not only healed, by spiritual means alone, many diseases recognized as incurable, but also, by the same means, raised people from the dead, is it plausible to believe that they, or any of them, needed the services of a medical practitioner? Especially is it inconceivable that the man who said, "I can do all things through Christ," and who was a successful demonstrator of God's healing power, should resort in his own behalf to material medicine. The Bible does not indicate or infer that Paul desired material nostrums or that Luke wished to administer them to him.

From her childhood Mrs. Eddy was an earnest and consecrated student of the Bible. She had a very sensitively spiritual nature; but this sensitiveness was entirely normal; and the normality and sensitiveness of her nature enabled her to be immediately restored to health, by the reading of a passage of Scripture, from the effects of an injury which had been pronounced fatal by physicians. Christian Science is the outgrowth of years of study and demonstration by Mrs. Eddy of the healing power of the Word of God. It is the natural spiritual method of healing, the method that Jesus used and of which Luke wrote, the method that Paul used and which Luke presumably witnessed. Christian Scientists fully agree that to be surrounded daily by influences that minister to health is a mark of Christian civilization, but they believe, and not only believe but understand, that the influences that minister to health are an understanding of God and an acquaintance with His creation; an understanding of the Christ, an appreciation of Jesus' ministry.

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