A recent critic, who signs himself "A Student of History," presents five dilemmas, which he hopes, I imagine, rather than expects, I shall be unable to reply to. He says that for one posing as a teacher I am very ignorant in mixing up Christian Science with historic Christianity. Now we will see about the ignorance presently, but I have not posed as a teacher. I have never written one word in this paper except in reply to attacks. In doing this, I have, I imagine, exactly fulfilled the demand of a certain historic Christian, named Peter, "to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you."

On the other hand, I am not aware that there is anything in historic Christianity which would support the habit of making anonymous attacks on other people,—imagine an apostle with an alias! Let me hasten to add that sobriquets, like "Boanerges," were not intended to conceal identity. Giving a reason for the hope that is in me, I repeat that historic Christianity is the Christianity taught by Jesus. The test of that Christianity is the ability of those who profess it to perform miracles. The rest is all talk. Any one can say that Jesus taught this or that; Jesus demanded that they should prove it. Denying that the command to heal the sick and raise the dead is operative today, is the most antichristian reading of history imaginable, and it is commonly supported by abusing some one else for endeavoring to do it. Centuries of burning and murdering dissenters from the chameleon of orthodoxy have never succeeded in healing the sick and raising the dead, nor will merely dogmatic statements, delivered with the full authority of anonymity, replace the historic Christianity of faith, demonstrated in deeds, by the pulpit Christianity of that faith without works which is dead.

Secondly, I am told that I am ignorant of the maxim that "the exception proves the rule," or I would never have quoted Mr. Haweis on the Athanasian creed. Now, to begin with, does your correspondent believe that Mr. Haweis was the solitary swallow of a non-Athanasian summer? He was, on the contrary, only an example of a colossal migration. Nor is the exception which proves the rule logic; it is purely a popular epigram, without its Latin origin quite as inaccurate as such things commonly are. Does your correspondent really think that it would prove two and two to be four if they were occasionally five?

Number three is a bald comparison in six lines between Christian Science and Buddhism. It is an ipse dixit, and a not very coherent one, given without an attempt at justification. Of course, if argument only consisted in making unsupported assertions, it would all be very simple. Your contributor's knowledge of Buddhism may, however, be deduced from his knowledge of Christian Science. He says Mrs. Eddy denies the necessity for a mediator. On page 30 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy writes, "This enabled him [Jesus] to be the mediator;" and on page 315, "Jesus was the mediator between Spirit and the flesh," while on page 332 she quotes Paul's words, "There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." I presume this statement is one of the exceptions from your contributor's accuracy which proves the rule.

Dilemma four simply bristles with inaccuracies. I rather thought when I wrote of Mrs. Eddy's noble chapter on Prayer, that your contributor would run his head against the nearest critical wall. The words "noble chapter on Prayer" are reproduced with "noble chapter" in inverted commas for the simple luxury of a sneer. It so happens, however, that the biter has been badly bitten. With miraculous accuracy he has supplied the inverted commas to what is really a quotation from one of the very keenest critics of Science and Health, but a man who had sufficient breadth of view to take breath in his animadversions to point out what a "noble chapter" the chapter on Prayer was.

Next, we are told that the original Greek of the word "atonement" has nothing to do with unity, and that any scholar could have told Mrs. Eddy so. As a matter of fact, no one ever said anything about the original Greek, but Mrs. Eddy, in common with every scholar who has written on the subject, has insisted that "atonement" means at-one-ment. It is a little arbitrary, at the same time, that all these scholars should be dismissed as ignorant, in a letter to the press. The word "atonement" occurs, to be quite accurate, exactly once in the whole King James text of the New Testament, but the Greek word translated "atonement" occurs several times, and in all the other instances is translated "reconciliation." There is no shadow of excuse for translating it propitiation, and this is so thoroughly recognized among theologians that Norris calmly declares that the word "atonement" has by a true instinct been deepened into expiation.

When people's instincts are permitted to alter the meanings of words, they generally alter them in accordance with their prejudices, and so we have "atonement" made into "expiation," and "sign" into "miracle." The King James translators used the word "atonement" because, like "reconciliation," it meant making at one. When Shakespeare makes Richard II say to Bolingbroke and Norfolk, "Since we cannot atone you" you must fight, there was no thought of expiation in his words; he meant simply, since we cannot make you one, or at one. This is exactly what Mrs. Eddy has insisted on. Your contributor, on the other hand, does not tell us what the historic doctrine of atonement is, whether it is that of Dr. Beibitz, or one of the other four he quotes, or one of those which held the field before any of these. The historic doctrine of the atonement is the doctrine taught by Jesus of Nazareth in the words, "I and the Father are one" (Revised Version), not, "I and my Father," which is a wrong translation. The original Greek is quite clear on that point. This doctrine is extended in that other saying, "my Father, and your Father," and is finally concentrated in the opening words of the Lord's Prayer, "Our Father which art in heaven."

Finally, under his fifth heading, your correspondent says I have watered down the statement that Christian Science can heal the sick and raise the dead, to simply healing the sick. This, of course, is another of the exceptions which prove his rule. I never even alluded to the subject. If, however, he wants me to allude to it, I will tell him that neither Peter nor Paul was God, but that they raised the dead, and that Christian Scientists can heal the sick and raise the dead exactly in proportion as they grow in the stature of the manhood of Christ.

Jesus of Nazareth healed the sick without any reference to medical theories, and he declared in a famous saying, made without reference to time or place, that those who believed on him would be able to repeat his works. If, therefore, it is necessary to employ doctors today, it can only be because "the prayer of faith," which the Bible says is to heal the sick, has become less efficacious, while the skill of the doctor, who may be "an infidel, heretic, or Turk," has grown more efficacious. In plain English, the Almighty permitted the workings of faith while generations of doctors were gradually qualifying themselves to better the gospel method. Surely such an argument has never been put forward since Kepler, with magnificent effrontery, declared that he could afford to wait a century for a reader of his book, when the Almighty Himself had been content to wait four thousand years before creating the man who could write it.

We all know the history of medicine. Inspired by a disreputable Roman god in Olympus; rioted in by pagan experts, whose remedies Pliny describes as frequently too foul to mention, and whose diploma he defines as the right to kill; then the playing thing of witch doctors, and later of itinerant charlatans; next endowed with a lancet in a barber's shop, and slowly emerging into the dispensary; and finally surviving in the medical schools of today. Century following century of charlatanism, superstition, and ignorance, and mankind left in suffering all the time while the atom was being discovered and subdivided into electrons. The whole idea is unthinkable and preposterous. They poured oil into men's wounds at Crécy just as they used antiseptics at Port Arthur, and healing took place because the minds of fourteenth-century bowmen were as susceptible to impressions as twentieth-century riflemen.

The writer of the old "Religio Medici" believed in mummy powders and prayer, while the author of the modern "Imitation" insists on vivisection, and says that prayers "cannot reach the cells of the liver." The result is about the same in each case, because sickness is a state of consciousness. That is why Jesus declared, "Whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk?" and that is why Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 460 of Science and Health, "Sickness is neither imaginary nor unreal,—that is, to the frightened, false sense of the patient. Sickness is more than fancy; it is solid conviction. It is therefore to be dealt with through right apprehension of the truth of being."

The early Christians never dreamed of separating the healing of sickness and sin. They recognized that the divine command was to preach the gospel and heal the sick, consequently they preached sermons, as Jesus did, which healed the sick. It never occurred to them that the pagan doctors, busy over their tabloids of charred weasels' flesh and tinctures of sea scorpions' gall, were healing anything. They believed that prayer could not only reach the cells of the liver, it could even raise the dead; but then, they regarded prayer a little differently from some modern critics.

A man who prays without ceasing is certainly not a man engaged in incessantly beseeching an omniscient Deity to change His mind and act differently. "Desire," Mrs. Eddy writes, on the very first page of Science and Health, "is prayer," and the man who incessantly desires to possess the Mind "which was also in Christ Jesus," is the man who continues instant in prayer. In order, however, that prayer may be efficacious, it must be scientific, not in the sense of Sir Oliver Lodge, but in the sense of the New Testament. The New Testament writers use a phrase, persistently and inadequately translated "knowledge of God," which should, of course, be translated "scientific knowledge of God." Such a knowledge is a knowledge of absolute Truth, beyond which there can be no knowledge fuller or more exact. This is the knowledge of the truth which Jesus declared would make the world free; the knowledge which can be demonstrated as all scientific knowledge can be, not in theories of the transmutation of matter into what Sir William Crookes terms "protyle," or the formless mist, nor even in what Sir William Ramsay terms the manifestation of energy, but rather in the healing of sickness, the overcoming of sorrow, the destruction of sin.

Nevertheless, natural science, if I may adapt a phrase of Mr. Whistler's, is, like nature itself, creeping up. No more is the believer in the miracle met with the bludgeon of "the Gadarene pig affair," or the enunciator of the unreality of matter confronted with the argument of the upraised heel. The miracle, the exegetist and the natural scientist begin to see, is the demonstration of a scientific theory; the unreality of matter, the natural scientist and the exegetist are slowly coming to perceive, is the theory of which the miracle is the demonstration. The only absolute science, said Aquinas, is theology, or the word of God; all the same, this science, as Aquinas fathomed it, was nothing more than what Paul describes to the Romans as "a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge." To the Franciscan Aristotelian, theology was the knowledge of an anthropomorphic Deity, but to Paul, theology was that scientific understanding inseparable from the Mind of Christ, and it was the Mind of Christ, and not the person of Jesus of Nazareth, which asked, "Whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, Arise, and walk?"

The Bible is either true or it is not. The Mind of Christ either once healed the sick and raised the dead or it did not. If it did, these things can be done again, as Jesus insisted, in the exact ratio in which a man knows the absolute Truth; that is, acquires the Mind of Christ. Sir Oliver Lodge launched the colossal truism that truth was in the world before modern natural science, which is only another way of saying that modern natural science is only very relatively scientific, which we all know. Jesus, walking on the sea of Galilee, broke the law of gravity just seventeen centuries before the apple, dropping in the garden at Woolsthorpe, revealed it to Newton. Nevertheless, modern natural science explained the "Riddle of the Universe," and denounced the immortality of the human soul which Sir Oliver proclaims.

What is the immortality of the soul which Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and all the helots of materialism have "sniffed at"? Tennyson says in "In Memoriam":—

All the same, neither the view of Sir Oliver nor Lord Tennyson can be made to square with the Bible. The soul, in the psychology of the Hebrews, was simply the animate principle in matter, and the bird, beast, and fishes of Genesis were all created with souls. Any one who will take the trouble to turn to the Psalms will see just what the writer thought about the immortality of the soul, and any one who will turn to the New Testament can learn what Jesus thought of it. The Greek of the New Testament and the Hebrew of the Old have precisely the same material meaning. In rare instances, it is true, a deific, not a human, significance is required by the text, but this only makes scrupulously accurate what Mrs. Eddy writes on page 482 of Science and Health: "The proper use of the word soul can always be gained by substituting the word God, where the deific meaning is required. In other cases, use the word sense, and you will have the scientific signification. As used in Christian Science, Soul is properly the synonym of Spirit, or God; but out of Science, soul is identical with sense, with material sensation."

The fact is, that most of these criticisms originate with critics who have not grasped the elementary fact, driven home so vigorously by Froude in his discussion of Spinozism, that every writer is at liberty to define his own terms, and that these definitions must be accepted in order to render discussion permissible and possible. So long as critics discuss Christian Science on the basis that you can legitimately define an isosceles triangle as an oblong, and then dismiss Euclid as nonsense, they will succeed in nothing beyond exposing their own ignorance. Christian Science is Science, and must be discussed exactly. It is Science, and therefore it depends on demonstration. Humanity has accepted religion for centuries on the basis of the blind faith of St. Gregory. Christian Science demands a return to the demonstrable Science preached by Jesus of Nazareth in Palestine.