Somewhat less than forty years ago an American lady,...

David Anderson—Melbourne, Australia.

Australian Farm and Home

Somewhat less than forty years ago an American lady, Mrs. Eddy, submitted to the public a metaphysical treatise dealing with the relation of man to his Maker. The unique characteristic of the work was the insistent and consistent adherence throughout to the Scriptural premises on which it was based,—the allness of God, Spirit, and man made in God's image and likeness,—and from that adherence its writer never swerved.

The full significance and far-reaching import of the logical conclusions from these premises are not reaily manifest to the reader who gives the book a casual and mayhap a hasty and somewhat careless perusal; and they are never visible to the critic who, from the view-point of opposition, allows his mental vision to be obscured and his judgment warped by an attitude of preconceived hostility to the writer and to the title and subject of her book. The truths involved are indeed slowly grasped in their entirety by the unbiased investigator who gives the book systematic study along with the Bible, and who is willing to make personal test of its statements by honest effort to reduce them to practise.

Differing radically from established scholastic theology, as well as from systems of "orthodox" religion and "regular" medicine, no other book has ever met with more sustained adverse criticism and opposition from the pulpit, the medical profession, and the press, or has been more generally misconstrued by those who are content to form literary and religious opinions at second hand; and few books, if any, have had a wider circulation during their author's lifetime, or are exercising greater influence on the religious thought of today, than the text-book of Christian Science, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy. Combining a code of Christian ethics with a wholly metaphysical system of healing disease, clergymen denounced its theology as devilish, although some conceded that, in a strictly limited sense, it might possibly be an aid to the sick; and medical critics declared its therapeutics to be a dangerous menace, although some were constrained to admit its morality as altogether Christlike. Today clergy and medical men are joining hands in agreement that salvation from sin and disease are closely allied as mental processes, and that while in a strictly limited sense the mind governs the body, the treatment of "serious" or "organic" disease must be by mind mixed with medicine.

Medical men have not formulated any clear-cut or unanimously agreed-on distinction between functional and organic complaints, but certain diseases are still classed as "incurable." Ailments of that class, including such diseases as tuberculosis, cancer, locomotor ataxia, etc., medically diagnosed as such have been healed in Christian Science after long periods of the best medical treatment available have been undergone in vain. Well-authenticated cases of such cures are instanced by an independent inquirer and careful investigator who is not a Christian Scientist, B. O. Flower, a former editor of the Twentieth Century Magazine, in his book entitled "Christian Science as a Religious Belief and a Therapeutic Agent," in which comparison is made of the teaching and practises of Jesus Christ with those of Christian Science, and consideration is given to the opposition of those unfriendly to the latter. The public are beginning to realize, from personal observation and knowledge of current happenings throughout the globe, that whether Christian Science be right or wrong in its ethics and therapeutics, it is bringing the comfort and well-being of moral and physical health, and the light and happiness of a spiritual regeneration to dwellers in homes formerly sin-darkened and disease-stricken, and they are beginning to wonder why those whose avocation is the effort to make the world of tomorrow better than the one of today, should quarrel with a religion that produces such results.

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