Article August 27, 1927 Issue

An author who has acquired a reputation for accurate...

Judge Clifford P. Smith, Committee on Publication for The First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, Massachusetts,—Worcester

Evening Gazette

An author who has acquired a reputation for accurate writing has defined a correct use of the word "science" as follows: "So soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation, it is called science. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement" (Will Durant, Ph. D., in "The Story of Philosophy," p. 2). Since you have published an article by a medical writer, who quoted with approval from a letter in which one of his correspondents had scoffed at Christian Science as not being a science, I wish to submit the foregoing quotation to the fair-minded consideration of your readers. According to the criterion it contains, and according to the definition in any dictionary, Christian Science is distinctly and emphatically a science.

At Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1866, Mrs. Eddy was delivered from the effects of a severe injury by means which included her reading an account of Christian healing in the New Testament. Immediately she began to devote her time and thought to the discovery of a positive rule by which divine Mind-healing could be effected. Nine years later, after hypothesis had flowed into achievement, she could and did put into exact formulation the knowledge which she had gained by consecrated and devout inquiry. As she then wrote, "I knew ... that cures were produced in primitive Christian healing by holy, uplifting faith; but I must know the Science of this healing, and I won my way to absolute conclusions through divine revelation, reason, and demonstration" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 109).

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