Article December 28, 1929 Issue

It is not the duty of a Christian Science Committee on...

Judge Clifford P. Smith, Committee on Publication for The Mother Church, Boston, Massachusetts,—Boston

Christian Leader

It is not the duty of a Christian Science Committee on Publication to reply to "everything displeasing to the church authorities." On the contrary, his duty is "to correct in a Christian manner impositions on the public in regard to Christian Science" and injustices done to Mrs. Eddy or members of The Mother Church (Church Manual, p. 97). Furthermore, having had charge of this work for over fifteen years, I know and declare positively that these Committees do not employ any such means as threatening editors with loss of advertising or subscriptions.

Most of the protests against the biography of Mrs. Eddy mentioned in your editorial of November 30 have been made by individual Christian Scientists acting on their own initiative. Here and there one of them, or a Committee on Publication, may have exceeded the bounds of propriety, but the author of the book in question (Mr. Dakin) and its publishers (the Messrs. Scribner) have furnished plenty of reasons for persuasive protests. For instance, they have advertised it as "unbiased," which it emphatically is not.

A large pamphlet could be filled with proofs that Mr. Dakin's biography of Mrs. Eddy is not unbiased, but I ask you to let me mention only two. The book in question is divided into parts, of which two are headed as follows: "A Woman becomes a Deity," "The Twilight of God." These headlines allude to Mrs. Eddy. And I submit to the fairminded readers of the Christian Leader that they are about as unjust and offensive to her and to Christian Scientists as anything that could be imagined.

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