Few people can have done more to keep Christian Science before the public than Mr. Paget. In the intervals between the arduous labors of inducing an unresponsive public to regard vivisection as humane, he has always been ready to urge a forlorn argument against Mrs. Eddy's teaching. What is necessary to demonstrate the brotherly love demanded in the New Testament, is, it appears, that the church and the medical profession should engage in a "furious, hating attack" on Christian Science. He does his share. No diocesan meeting is complete without him. It is there that he proclaims the discovery of the twentieth century: "Prayer cannot reach the cells of the liver."

One of the first rules of Christian Science, this critic gravely announced, was that nothing was real except God. You might just as well insist that one of the first rules of the Church of England was that there was a Trinity. It is perhaps unnecessary to say that Christian Science teaches no such thing. It lays down as a fundamental truth the statement that the only reality is God and His spiritual kingdom. In doing this, it has on its side a better authority than the critic, namely, the fourth gospel; and if he doubts this, he had better study the works of that great scholar, Dr. Westcott, bishop of Durham. Dr. Westcott explains that the apostle draws a distinct line between "the truth" and "truth," and that he used the former to denote the actual, that which is.

Then the critic went on to say that Christian Science taught that sin, pain, disease, and death are not really real. If they are not real, they are naturally not really real. Of course, what Christian Science says is something quite different to what he says it says. It says that evil of any sort is ignorance of God, and that the ministry of Jesus was given to proving this. Jesus himself destroyed sin, pain, disease, and death, which he certainly could not have done if they had been realities of God's creating, of what Dr. Westcott points out the fourth gospel means by the absolute truth, that which actually is.

From this, the critic arrives at the conclusion that Christian Science healing is accomplished by people who are in pain thinking they are not in pain. He need not have taken the trouble to show so completely his generous ignorance of what he was talking about. "Sickness is more than fancy," Mrs. Eddy writes on page 460 of Science and Health; "it is solid conviction. It is therefore to be dealt with through right apprehension of the truth of being." This righ apprehension is not gained by sitting down and pretending something you do not believe, but by gaining that knowledge of the truth, of the actual, which comes only as any one overcomes the carnal mind, and gains instead the Mind that was in Christ Jesus.

It would be tedious to follow this critic through the whole gamut of his misstatements, nor is it possible to demand the necessary space. It is always a much shorter process to make a misstatement than to correct it. Still, some one ought really to see that the gentleman reads Science and Health before he lectures on it. When he turned from theology to medicine, he was equally unhappy, for his views of evidence are as peculiar as Mr. Weller's knowledge of London. He talks airily of two hundred insignificant cases which he has examined. As a matter of fact, it must be obvious to anybody who thinks at all, that if Christian Science healing had really been confined to an infinitesimal number of cases of headache and indigestion the movement would have collapsed long ago. As for the failures to which he alludes, if anything were to be gained by raking up failures, enough could be raked up against the medical profession to dispose of it forever; and the medical profession has the power to keep dark its own failures in a way impossible to any other body of people. No matter what mistakes may be made, a doctor has only to give a certificate, and there is an end of the matter. As a gentleman very clearly put it, at the close of the proceedings, a Christian Scientist is absolutely unable to give a certificate, and therefore, in the few cases in which he fails, there is an inquest. If there were an inquest on all the cases in which doctors fail, there would be thousands of inquests every day.

The critic declares that if people dug down to the roots of Christian Science, they would find some very ugly things. Some time ago, an attempt was made to advertise for the victims of Christian Science. The efforts of the advertisers were not rewarded by a success. At the same time, it is possible, trouble, to find some extremely ugly facts in the records of medical practise. Most people know of an inquest which took place not so very long ago, on a patient in whom a doctor's forceps had been sewn up after an operation. This sort of argument is about the most childhish proceeding anybody could indulge in. There was an ugly incident in Palestine, two thousand years ago, when Judas betrayed Jesus of Nazareth. That might just as well be used as an argument against the teaching of Christianity as the sewing up of a forceps in a patient's body against medical practise, or as some chance incident, which has never been specified, against Christian Science.

The fact is that Christian Science is growing, and growing in an extraordinary way, in spite of futile attacks, like that of this critic. It is growing, not because it has healed two hundred cases of indigestion and headache, but because it has healed millions of cases of every sort of sickness known to man, and of every kind of sorrow and misery, and every description of sin. The critic asks his audience to believe that innumerable thousands of people in every country in the world have been imposed upon by the healing of two hundred backaches. Such an idea is simply ludicrous. The Christian Science movement has its churches in every country. It numbers in its ranks men and women of all sorts and conditins; members of the legislative chambers of the world, great soldiers and sailors, merchants whose names are a guarantee of their ability, artists and engineers, writes and musicians, men whose lives have been devoted to the study of natural science, and, besides these, workers in the shops and factories of the great industrial cities, and in the mines and on the ranches of five continents. When this critic learns to think outside the parish, he will begin to know that Christian Science is a world movement, and he will come to understand that bundling from platforms of diocesan meetings to church schoolrooms is about as likely to drag upon its wheels as a stick of firewood attached to the stern of an Atlantic liner.