Article July 22, 1933 Issue

In the Statesman of August 21 prominence is given...

Malcolm R. Atkins, Committee on Publication for Northern and Eastern Districts of India,—Calcutta

Statesman

In the Statesman of August 21 prominence is given under the above heading [The Way to Truth] to an extract from a sermon delivered by a bishop in connection with the centenary celebration of the British Medical Association. In this sermon the bishop makes an obvious allusion to the teachings of Christian Science on the subject of the nonexistence of evil as follows: "If evil be nonexistent, and pain a mere fancy of the mind, ... medical research is, of course, valueless. You can easily reply that pain is horribly real, that disease is a grim fact in human life, and that a faith which denies such truths provides an illusory cushion against reality." May I be permitted to correct any misunderstanding of the teachings of Christian Science which these words may convey by pointing out that to accept pain and disease as "truths" is to accept as real the very conditions which Jesus did so much to remove from human experience. Such conditions cannot, therefore, be part of that truth of which he spoke when he said, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

Sickness is like a mistake made by a student in a sum in arithmetic. The mistake cannot be corrected merely by the student's knowledge of the mistake; but it can be corrected by the student's understanding of the laws of mathematics, and then it ceases to be expressed. So sickness, when destroyed by the correct apprehension of the truth of being, loses whatever appearance of reality it ever possessed, and is found to have been no more a "fact in human life" than the msitake in the sum was a fact in mathematics.

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