Some few years ago an English clergyman, who is to—day in charge of a great parish in an industrial city in the north, visited one of the Christian Science churches in London. When the meeting was over he lingered to talk to those about him. He told them that it was not the first time he had attended the services, and that his attention had in the first instance been attracted by the attacks in the religious press. "I felt," he said, "certain that nothing but Truth could have aroused such intemperance and malice, and I determined to judge for myself I came, I saw, and of this I am convinced, that there is going steadily forward in the Christian Science churches a work which man cannot overthrow, nor misrepresentation in the long run overcloud. I have told those of my fellow ministers with whom I have been brought in contact, that they are attacking, not Christian Science, but their own misconception of it. and that if they do not soon find this out for themselves the public will find them out."

A generation which has bought the latest "exposures" of Christian Science and the numerous so—called lives and character sketches of its Founder may well be content to listen, in a phrase of Lord Macaulay, to a genuine anecdote on the subject. The more so as it may suggest a reason for the failure of this industry to accomplish anything of moment. The human mind is tenacious of its opinions, whether they are founded on fact or fiction. Indeed, it often clings most tenaciously to the least defensible, inasmuch as they reflect its own passions rather than the vast impersonality of Truth. In this way it has involved itself in a riot of contradictions in its attempted criticisms of Christian Science. One moment it declares that Mrs. Eddy is the tool of an unscrupulous junto, the next that she rules as despotically as Cyrus or Augustus. It is not satisfied with proving that Science and Health is an illiterate and hysterical rhapsody, it must prove simultaneously that it is "wise and sane and lucid and elevated," whilst it is so dubious about the attributes of Christian Scientists that it hesitates and is lost between ignorant buffoons, simpering ladies, astute charlatans, and refined and cultivated men and women.

Now, argument by appeal to prejudice is invariably a two—edged weapon. It may temporarily persuade those to whom the wish is father to the thought, but it is always liable to sudden and unmerciful exposure. A gentleman who had been assured that Christian Scientists were naturally effeminate, was astonished to find that three gymnasium sergeants of a neighboring military depot were regular attendants at a tiny Christian Science meeting in the eastern counties; whilst quite recently some students of natural Science from one of the great colleges in the south, who had attended another meeting in a spirit of mockery, were equally astonished when their own professor rose to add his testimony to those of the other speakers, and went home more conscious of the simple fact that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in the philosophy of the quadrangle.

Incidents like these are occurring every day. A little while ago a London daily paper gravely informed its readers that the congregation of the church in Sloane Terrace consisted of about forty people, mostly women and children, who met in an underground room. The writer had apparently penetrated to the children's service, which is held, not in an underground room, but in the Sunday School beneath the church, and even then he must have seriously underestimated the numbers. Thousands of those who read this statement must have known it to be nonsense, and the disillusionment of the remainder was sure to come. The forty women and children must indeed have grown, at the pace of Falstaff's men in buckram, by the time of the lecture in Albert Hall last April. And yet the people who are employing these methods are astonished at the continued growth of Christian Science. The children in the Sunday School could have accounted for it to them, for amongst them there prevails a fearlessness of sickness and a consciousness of God's power to heal them that might act as an object lesson to the believers in faith without deeds. To them it is perfectly natural that God should keep them well and happy. They expect nothing less. Tell them anything to the contrary, and they will regard you partially with amusement and wholly with astonishment.

The fact is that Christian Scientists are perfectly aware that their opponents are twenty centuries behind Gamaliel in grasping the situation. They have themselves neither the time nor the desire to attack the opinions of their neighbors. They know that whatever there is of truth in those opinions cannot be overthrown, and that whatever there is of error will most assuredly come to naught. "Laborare est orare," ran the old Latin proverb, "to work is to pray." The Christian Science song, writes Mrs. Eddy, "is 'work—work—work—watch and pray.' ... The right thinker works; he gives little time to society manners, or matters, and benefits society by his example and usefulness. He takes no time for amusement,, ease, frivolity; he earns his money and gives it wisely to the world" (Message to The Mother Church, June, 1900, p. 4). Yet it is persistently repeated that Christian Science is the religion of the idle and well to—do. Only the other day a religious newspaper went out of its way to sneer at the idea of a Christian Science church in the suburbs. Well, there are Christian Science meetings in the suburbs, and there will soon be more. It is just in the great seaports, and in the industrial cities where the struggle for existence is sternest, and the world seems clothed in drab, shot with furnace smoke, that, outside London, Christian Science has taken firmest hold. Even in the London churches it may safely be asserted that ninety five per cent of the men are hard workers at the ordinary avocations of their sex; and when their day's work is done they are to be found, long into the night, sitting by the besides of the sick, and binding up the brokenhearted. The gossip about society crazes is simple nonsense. It is not because Lady Victoria Murray is the daughter of an earl, but because she healed the sick, that there is to—day a beautiful Christian Science church in Manchester. She took the healing of Christian Science, the healing of the seamless dress, the healing which Jesus taught, to the workers of the north, and those workers heard her gladly. Let any one go into the meetings in Manchester or in Rochdale, in Liverpool or in Hull, and see how many society idlers are to be found there.

It is indubitable that the spread of Christian Science has been in an exact ratio to its healing work, and that healing is the healing of the mind no less than the healing of the body, the destruction of sorrow no less than the destruction of pain. Jesus said that those who could not believe for the word's sake must accept the lower evidence of the works. The physical healing of Christian Science is to—day just what the physical healing of the first century was, the object—lesson in support of the theology. "Now, as then," Mrs. Eddy writes, "sings and wonders are wrought in the metaphysical healing of physical disease; but these signs are only to demonstrate its divine origin,—to attest the reality of the higher mission of the Christ power to take away the sins of the world" (Science and Health, p. 150).

It is because Christian Science does heal the sick in this way that it is beyond the power of man to stay its course. Those who oppose it may deny all this, may deride it, may go so far as to misrepresent it, but even as they do so they hear the roar of the incoming tide. as Canute and his courtiers heard the rush of the waves over the shore at Southampton a thousand years ago.