Article July 30, 1927 Issue

In your recent issue appears a report by a bishop of a...

Cecil E. Benjamin, Committee on Publication for the Cape of Good Hope, Union of South Africa,—Cape Town

Cape Argus

In your recent issue appears a report by a bishop of a lecture on Christian Science, and I ask to be allowed to point out some of his misconceptions. In reply to the estimate that there are only three hundred and fifty thousand Christian Scientists in the United States, I do not know the source of this information or whether it is accurate, but obviously numbers are never a safe criterion of the rightness or the wrongness of a cause, and the bishop may be reminded that there was a time when there was only one Christian in the world. In passing, however, I may say this, that the number of Christian Science churches and societies has increased during the past forty-eight years from one to over two thousand three hundred, and that last year recorded the greatest increase in the number of members of The Mother Church. The assertion that only the well-to-do can become members is not well founded, but perhaps it has at the back of it just this fact, that Christian Science shows humanity that divine aid is available for the solution of its problems of lack of supply as well as for the healing of sin and disease.

The bishop says Christian Science cannot heal organic disease. Dr. Charles Hunter, Professor of Clinical Medicine in the University of Manitoba, says: "Christian Science has helped many persons suffering from diseases which, to the medical practitioner, had defied diagnosis. ... Christian Science, furthermore, has brought relief to individuals who were victims of organic disorder, proving that psychotherapy is not confined solely to functional diseases." Dr. Drummond Sheils, member of the British Parliament, recently said: "Some of the most remarkable cases I know of, wonderful cures, have been in connection with Christian Science, which I have seen myself, and know."

To bring this closer home, in this country in 1924 a great number of affidavits sworn to by South Africans testifying to the healing by Christian Science of practically all kinds of disease, including blindness, cancer, curvature of the spine, and other maladies ordinarily regarded as incurable, were filed with a Parliamentary Select Committee.

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