To the world today Christian Science is represented by an ever-increasing body of people,—ordinary intelligent people, living peaceful, sober, and industrious lives, interfering with no one; not thrusting their religion on others, but affirming that Christian Science has brought to them a measure of health and happiness they knew not before, and ever willing to help their brother man to acquire the practical knowledge of God that has had such a beneficent influence on their own lives.
Futile striving of mere imagination in the empty air of unreal speculative dogmas and abstractions was not the method of the healing of sickness and sin by Jesus.
Instead of using suggestion, or the control of one human mind over another, the teaching and practice of Christian Science require that directly the opposite course be followed, and that by reliance upon divine power the sufferer be made free from every sort of evil suggestion and influence through which he has been made sick.
The fact that many thousands of people are demonstrating Christian Science in the healing of all manner of diseases and sins sets at naught one's reckless assertion that "the philosophy and juggling of words which sets forth this science cannot be understood.
Whether he is aware of it or not our critic flings overboard the whole teaching of the idealism of natural science as completely as the idealism of Christian Science.
Since
Christian Science has proved such a success as a great healing and reformatory movement, the world has been flooded with various imitations of it.
No
word in Christian Science comes to me with greater force than does the word "Principle," for it brings to my consciousness the new understanding of God which the study of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" has revealed,—the understanding of a God of whom the psalmist says, "Thou openest thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing.
We
read in the "explanatory note" of our Quarterly that "the Bible and the Christian Science text-book are our only preachers," and the testimonial meetings and periodicals constantly reiterate that their correlative use in the Lesson-Sermon is the basis for demonstration in disproving error by proving good.
After
we commence the study of Christian Science, and more or less until we have completely attained the final heavenly, spiritual estate, we are subject to a conflicting sense of things.
