Article May 16, 1931 Issue

The letter which appeared in your issue of the 21st inst.,...

John G. Sumner, Committee on Publication for County Antrim, Ireland,—Belfast

Witness

The letter which appeared in your issue of the 21st inst., if not corrected, would tend to mislead your readers on the points mentioned regarding Christian Science. Christian Science certainly does not teach that spiritual thinking produces physical life. On the contrary, spiritual thinking, Christian Science informs us, leads to God, Spirit, and away from matter. Paul says in his epistle to the Romans, "To be spiritually minded is life and peace."

Your critic writes, "Jesus never said a word to suggest that the diseases he healed were not real." Did he not refer to the woman he healed of an infirmity of eighteen years' standing as one "whom Satan hath bound"? The word "Satan," or devil, defined by Jesus himself, implies a lie or a liar; so here we have Jesus' definition of disease as something which is untrue and therefore unreal. Christian Science heals disease as Christ Jesus did, on the basis of its unreality and in demonstration of the allness of God, good.

The critic also says, "Christians do not look to men to fulfill their ideals, they look to Christ and to the power which he gives to those who ask for it." The purpose of Christian Science is to glorify God, not man. Christian Science enjoins its students to look to the Christ-ideal, and to bring out this ideal in their own lives, healing sickness and destroying sin. Mary Baker Eddy writes in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 496), "Hold perpetually this thought,—that it is the spiritual idea, the Holy Ghost and Christ, which enables you to demonstrate, with scientific certainty, the rule of healing, basedupon its divine Principle, Love, underlying, overlying, and encompassing all true being."

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