Article October 12, 1929 Issue

A letter printed in the February 16 issue of your paper,...

J. Latimer Davis, Committee on Publication for the State of Iowa,—Centerville

Iowegian and Citizen

A letter printed in the February 16 issue of your paper, under the heading "Christian Science Lecture Reviewed," although apparently written without intentional misrepresentation of Christian Science, nevertheless conveyed to your readers wrong impressions of that religion, and I should like to correct at least a few of the misleading statements it contained.

Much of what your contributor wrote on the subjects discussed was of course given from a viewpoint foreign to Christian Science, and consequently distorted the meaning of certain statements made by the lecturer from whose discourse he quoted. First of all, it should be understood that underlying the Christian Science lecture reviewed in your columns, as well as all lectures on Christian Science by members of the Board of Lectureship of The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts, is the great fact of God's allness as Spirit and the consequent nothingness of matter. God, Spirit, being All, it is self-evident that matter, Spirit's opposite, can have no actual existence and that its asserted existence must be fictitious—a false belief of mortals.

It is universally held by all Christian people that God does not change, but is eternally the same, and that He is the Father of man. Then He must always have been the Father of man, and man must always have been His child. Thus God and man have eternally coexisted as Father and child. This is the teaching of Christian Science concerning the relation of God and man. So when Christian Science declares that man has neither birth nor death it is the spiritual real man, the image and likeness of God, who is spoken of. Our kindly critic said that if this is what the lecturer meant (and it was) then such teaching is embraced by most Christian people; and he added, "It is not the special property of Christian Scientists." Here it should be stated that Christian Scientists have never claimed any monopoly of the truth, which is free for all to accept, and available for all to practice. In another sentence, however, the writer for your columns said that to declare man to be unaffected by birth and death was an "insult" to man's "intelligence"; and to this it may be answered that only a mortal's sense of intelligence finds an affront in such a statement.

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