The statement of a clergyman on the subject of Christian Science,...

Frederick Dixon—Hanley, England.

Staffordshire Sentinel

The statement of a clergyman on the subject of Christian Science, in your issue of the 2d inst., is one of those casual obiter dicta which, when examined, resolve themselves into nothing at all. This critic explains that he has known certain mental conditions on which Christian Science has acted detrimentally. When this is reduced from a mere general statement to closer examination, what does it really amount to? That there are certain people of more or less deranged mentalities in the world who may have come across Christian Science without profiting by it. Such a statement applies to everything else known to man. You might as well propose to abolish the monarchy, because the asylums have numerous inmates who imagine themselves to be kings and queens. You might as well propose to suppress all religious teaching, because the asylums are crowded with religious maniacs. It would, in short, be probably impossible to name a single subject which has not affected some person of diseased mentality to a greater or less degree unfavorably.

It is quite possible that certain people in this diseased condition have been affected by Christian Science. It is absolutely certain that hundreds of them have been rescued from this diseased condition by Christian Science, and, curiously enough, the one admission which the medical profession and the critics of Christian Science are generally willing to make is, that it is just such cases of diseased mentality which may be most profitably entrusted to Christian Science treatment. The fact is that the critic is, as usual, muddling up Christian Science with hypnotic suggestion, and hypnotic suggestion is, unfortunately, becoming more and more a factor in ordinary medical practice. Now, hypnotic suggestion would really be one of the most dangerous things in the world; because of the belief that it can be used for the purpose of effecting positive evil as well as nominal good, were it not for the teaching of Christian Science that evil has no power, since God, good, is the only power.

What Christian Science is doing, among other things, is showing exactly what mental suggestion is and what it leads to, and because of this very thing it is meeting, as might be expected, with opposition, for it is teaching the world how to protect itself against and free itself from all the arts of mental suggestion. Mental suggestion is no new thing, it is exactly as old as the human mind. Its home is the east, on the banks of the Indus or the Nile. There, in the east, the monotheistic patriarchs, prophets, judges, and kings of Israel met it and fought it. There, in the east, the hierarchy of later Israel connived at its practice and endeavored, just as is the case among the opponents of Christian Science today, to confuse it with Christian healing. There, Jesus met, exposed, and crushed the attempt, in the famous saying, "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand: and if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand? And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out? therefore they shall be your judges. But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you."

The "vagabond Jews," or exorcists, were the children who preferred to cast out devils by Beelzebub, but whose claim was a house divided against a house, since every one knew that the magicians pretended to work spells of good and evil. Healing, on the other hand, through the Spirit of God, is the acquirement of the Mind of Christ, through the understanding of the absolute unreality and powerlessness of evil. The simple fact is that mental suggestion, in any phase, is anti-Christian, and no matter how vigorous the denial of this may be, to assert the contrary is to remain kicking against the pricks. This exposure of the powerlessness of evil, and consequent assertion of the omnipotence and ever-presence of good, is one element in the teaching of Christian Science, one element in the teaching of the truth which is to free the world, and the world owes it to Mrs. Eddy.

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