Article August 16, 1952 Issue

CHRISTIAN SILENCE

PETER J. HENNIKER HEATON

A small boy started attending a Christian Science Sunday School. He was a talkative child, and one Sunday morning he told his teacher that his father, who was not a Christian Scientist, had good-humoredly remarked, "I wish your Christian Science would teach you a little Christian silence."

Christian Science does indeed teach its students Christian silence. It teaches them to refrain from voiding destructive criticism, gossip, or discouragement, on the basis of the allness of God, good. it teaches them to meet wrongful accusations with the quiet assurance of man's inviolable innocence by reason of his spiritual selfhood, rather than with the strident self-assertion of person pique. Above all, it teaches them to listen attentively while the clamor material sense is silenced by Christly right thinking, which effects Christian Science healings.

Spiritual victory is won by spiritual means. "The Lord is in his hold temple: let all the earth keep silence before him," said the prophet Habakkuk (2:20). In Christian Science healing, Spirit silences the testimony of evil with its own spiritual testimony that God, good, is All-in-all; that the perfect maker inevitably expresses Himself in a perfect creation. Thus the delusion called evil is excluded from experience in proportion as the true facts of God and man are entertained in individual consciousness.

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