Article August 2, 1930 Issue

It is doubtful whether "R.S." meant his letter in the...

Miss Dora M. Kisch, Committee on Publication for the Transvaal, South Africa,—Johannesburg

Rand Daily Mail

It is doubtful whether "R.S." meant his letter in the Rand Daily Mail to be taken seriously. Certainly a spirit of levity seems to have prompted his last question: "What is it the ambulance takes to the hospital [after an accident]?" Christian Scientists are normal people and would answer this question in a normal way.

It is possible, however, that the critic is sincere in his request that I should quote what the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," says about what is termed "matter." In the following extract (p. 468), Mrs. Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, has given this crystallized statement—"the scientific statement of being": "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual." And in another paragraph on the same page she says, "Substance is that which is eternal and incapable of discord and decay."

These statements were written many years ago, but to-day the trend of modern science is in the same direction. In a London weekly review there recently appeared a series of articles in which the writer endeavored to give the man in the street an understanding of the modern scientific outlook. He begins his second article by saying: "Our ordinary notion of matter appears to be very difficult to define. We know that matter has weight, and that it resists being moved about; but these qualities do not appear to be sufficient to describe what we mean by 'matter.' We attribute to matter, over and above these properties, a quality of substantiality. ... Modern scientific theories deprive matter of this quality, and that is the chief reason why we find these theories so baffingly 'abstract.' "

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