Article January 14, 1928 Issue

A recent issue of your paper reports an address by a doctor...

Edgar McLeod, Committee on Publication for Northern California,

Stockton Record

A recent issue of your paper reports an address by a doctor who condemns and ridicules the various systems of healing which differ from his own. He speaks disparagingly of the judgment of persons who exercise their right to choose remedial aid other than the one he himself espouses, and makes several statements that show he is badly informed and has a complete misapprehension with respect to the teaching and practice of Christian Science. His first misapprehension of Christian Science is displayed in placing it under the head of new-thought. Unbiased investigators know that Christian Science is a religion which is based upon the teaching of the Bible, particularly upon the teaching of Christ Jesus. The doctor's challenge to Christian Science to prove its ability to effect cures is answered in the more than two thousand Christian Science churches and societies which have been formed throughout the world within the past thirty-five years, mainly by grateful persons who have been healed through its ministrations, not infrequently after their cases had been abandoned as hopeless and incurable by material systems. The challenge is further answered by thousands of testimonies, oral and written, which have been voluntarily given by persons in all classes of society, representing a very wide range of thought and experience, including clergymen, doctors, professors, jurists, actors, and artists. In fact, persons from every station and condition of life have borne testimony to the healing efficacy of Christian Science.

The doctor, in deriding mental and spiritual treatment, should note that since Christian Science healing has become an accepted fact, there has been a growing tendency on the part of thoughtful physicians to observe more carefully the mental condition of patients, and to take into account mental as well as physical factors in their diagnoses. This growing tendency was emphasized by the trend of thought during the meeting of the American Medical Association which recently convened in Washington, District of Columbia, where, among many similar statements, it was declared by one eminent specialist that "heartbreak, the fires of ambition, the gnawing of discontent, the secret fear, tear down the physical being," and that "the doctor of the future will be a man trained in the mysterious processes of the mind." This tendency among the physicians assembled in Washington to attribute physical effects to mental causes, and to encourage research in the mental realm, is interesting in view of the fact that the destructive effect of fear and mental unrest on health was stressed by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, over fifty years ago, all of which impels the observation that until medical critics have gained more definite knowledge of the workings of the mortal or carnal mind, they should be tolerant toward a religion which teaches reliance on the divine Mind. The great Master said to Nicodemus: "If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?" The inference that Christian Scientists "are not concerned with crippled children's problems because to them they don't exist," is misleading and unfair, and flagrantly misrepresents the teaching and practice of Christian Science. Jesus did not mock the man with the withered hand by telling him that his crippled condition had no existence; but by instantaneously restoring the sufferer to normality, he proved conclusively that the discordant condition was no part of God's perfect creation and, therefore, in fact had no existence in Truth. Similarly. Christian Scientists recognize disease as a mortal condition to be rejected and destroyed in accordance with the law of God which Christ Jesus invoked in destroying sin and disease.

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