Article October 12, 1929 Issue

Your readers must be grateful for the tolerance shown by...

Charles W. J. Tennant, District Manager of Committees on Publication for Great Britain and Ireland,—Ireland

Newry Reporter

Your readers must be grateful for the tolerance shown by the editorial in your issue of January 12, which deplored the deliberate raising of a religious controversy over a question in which the religious beliefs of those concerned should play no part, the Girl Guide movement being nonsectarian and undenominational.

In the same issue, an archdeacon quotes many passages from "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" and "Miscellaneous Writings" by Mary Baker Eddy, and asks me to confirm or deny them. In so far as quotations separated from their context, and in some instances consisting of unfinished sentences, may be said to represent the teaching on any subject, those he has given may be said to represent some aspects of Christian Science. It should be pointed out, however, that it is possible to make any teaching appear incomprehensible and contradictory by employing the method adopted by the archdeacon. Let me illustrate this by referring to one quotation. He quotes without explanation, "Man is incapable of sin, sickness, and death" (Science and Health, p. 475). Here Mrs. Eddy is referring to man made in the image and likeness of God, spiritual man, not to mortal man, who is the expression of sin. I have already referred in a previous letter to the distinction made in the first and second chapters of Genesis between spiritual man, made in the image and likeness of God, Spirit, and so-called mortal man, formed of the dust of the ground. It is necessary to understand this fundamental fact in order to understand the teachings of Christian Science.

On more than one occasion Christ jesus made the healing of the sick the sign or proof of the truth he taught, as when the disciples of John the Baptist sent to ask if he were the Messiah. "Go and shew John again," he said, "those things which ye do hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them." Christian Scientists have accepted the full command of Christ Jesus to preach the gospel and to heal the sick, and are endeavoring to follow, however feebly, in the footsteps of the great Way-shower. Would not the archdeacon be wise to accept the advice of Gamaliel given some two thousand years ago, and recorded in the fifth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles: "If this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God"?

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