It was not your correspondent's correct quotation from...

Virgil H. Clymer

Syracuse (N. Y.) Herald

It was not your correspondent's correct quotation from Christian Science authorities, but the deductions he made, which constituted his "man of straw," and his second letter only emphasizes his misunderstanding of the subject. He is misinformed about the case of infantile paralysis. Neither parent of the child was a Christian Scientist at the time. The physicians exhausted their resources before the parents turned to Christian Science, and there is no reason to doubt that both physicians and parents deserve praise rather than censure for their sincere efforts. Under the Christian Science treatment the child was greatly benefited.

Christian Science is the opposite of suggestive therapeutics. Two things could not be more unlike. The basis of suggestive therapeutics is a lie, i.e., the giving of an untrue suggestion to the patient. Jesus said the truth—not a lie or false suggestion—made free, and it is through the understanding of the Christ, Truth, that Christian Scientists bring about the healing of the sick and the sinning.

Your correspondent again misinterprets Christian Science when he tries to make your readers believe it teaches a world without law. It teaches the contrary. On page xi of the Preface to "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy says: "The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus' time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation. Now, as then, these mighty works are not super-natural, but supremely natural." Also on page 124 she says: "Spirit is the life, substance, and continuity of all things. We tread on forces. Withdraw them, and creation must collapse. Human knowledge calls them forces of matter; but divine Science declares that they belong wholly to divine Mind, are inherent in this Mind, and so restores them to their rightful home and classification."

The Christian Science lecturer was right if he said material laws are unstable, or that our physical senses are not sure guides. Everybody knows that when one looks along two parallel tracks in the distance they seem to meet; that the rising of the sun seems to prove its passage around the earth; that the prestidigitator deceives the senses in a thousand ways, but that knowing the truth about these matters corrects the "seeming," and healing is the result. Fear of the very material law which our critic so strenuoulsy defends is the foundation of all disease—fear that the material laws are supreme and more powerful than spiritual law. In the unsanitary shop he mentions, perhaps greed caused the conditions, and fear of those conditions did the rest. Fear of poverty is the foundation of greed. Right thinking and acting by all connected with the shop would have met and mastered the greed and fear and prevented disease.

The assumption that Christian Scientists do not believe in cleanliness is unwarranted and ridiculous. Our critic knows better. Panama, which he mentions as if it were an argument against Christian Science, was cleaned up as a result of clean thinking preceding the work. The work of Christian Scientists at Panama was such that former President Taft, who was then in office, issued an order permitting the practice of Christian Science in the Canal Zone.

There is a saying that "a grain of proof is worth a pound of argument," and it is pertinent to quote from page 81 of "Miscellaneous Writings" where Mrs. Eddy says, "To prevent all unpleasant and unchristian action—as we drift, by right of God's dear love, into more spiritual lines of life—let each society of practitioners, the matter-physicians and the metaphysicians, agree to disagree, and then patiently wait on God to decide, as surely He will, which is the true system of medicine."

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