Article August 9, 1930 Issue

I must once more trespass on your kindness and ask you...

Philip H. Simpson, Committee on Publication for Cape Province, South Africa,—East London

I must once more trespass on your kindness and ask you to allow me to make a final reply to a doctor's latest letter, in which he indulges in further misrepresentations of Christian Science. The insistence on the reality of sin, vice, and cruelty, and that God Himself can break their power, carries with it the implication that God knows evil, and that in some indefinite way it has His sanction.

It is accepted among Christians that God is the only cause and creator, that there is no God beside Him, and that everything He made was very good. Habakkuk confirms the perfection of God in the words, "Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity." It is logical to assume, therefore, that evil, which was never created by God, exists only as illusion, unreality, although it may appear very real to men. The crucifixion of Jesus was not of God's arranging; it was the cumulative effects of evil, of intolerance, bigotry, hatred, envy—the carnal mind, which is always at enmity against God. By overcoming evil, including death, Jesus demonstrated evil's unreality, and man's dominion over it through Christ, Truth. Christian Science gives full significance to his wonderful act of love, as will appear from one of its tenets, to be found in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy (p. 497) and in the Church Manual (p. 15), which reads in part, "We acknowledge Jesus' atonement as the evidence of divine, efficacious Love, unfolding man's unity with God through Christ Jesus the Way-shower."

I should like to assure the doctor that he is mistaken in thinking that Christian Scientists resort to unfair means in order to gain adherents to their church. The attractionn to Christian Science is due to the fact that it presents to the world a practical religion, a religion which heals the sick and sinning.

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