Article January 3, 1925 Issue

I have at hand a copy of your valued paper containing...

Edwin C. Buck, Committee on Publication for New Hampshire,—Derry

Times

I have at hand a copy of your valued paper containing excerpts of an attack made by a local clergyman on Christian Science and its Discoverer and Founder, Mary Baker Eddy. As I read I am impressed with the truth of Montaigne's words, "A man often strips himself of his doublet to leap no further than he would have done in his gown." May I trespass briefly to offer comment? There is no escape from the fact that the Scriptural injunctions to "preach the kingdom of God" and to "heal the sick" are inseparably linked together. The ministry of Jesus and of the disciples and, as history records, the healing of the sick and the raising of the dead, as a part of the activity of the early Christian Church for more than three hundred years after the crucifixion, confirm and establish the fact. And it was, as Mrs. Eddy writes, "to commemorate the word and works of our Master, which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing" (Church Manual, p. 17), that the Christian Science church came into being.

No student of Christian Science expects to absorb and assimilate this teaching so readily that he will achieve the ultimate demonstrations at a single leap, any more than does a student of mathematics, chemistry, or physics. Logically, it is an indication neither of "inconsistency" nor of "imbecility" to put into practice what we understand, whether it be in religion or in other lines of endeavor. On page 254 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy writes: "During the sensual ages, absolute Christian Science may not be achieved prior to the change called death, for we have not the power to demonstrate what we do not understand. But the human self must be evangelized. This task God demands us to accept lovingly to-day, and to abandon so fast as practical the material, and to work out the spiritual which determines the outward and actual." The recent statement from a Congregational pulpit in Rochester, "In religion woman is already supreme. The only first-rate influence on the religious life of our day was a woman, Mary Baker Eddy," would indicate that all of the clergy are not of the temper of our critic.

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