In a recent issue of the Record-Herald there appeared an...

Joseph Coffer

Miami (Okla.) Record-Herald

In a recent issue of the Record-Herald there appeared an advertisement under the caption, "Is the Bible Wrong? Christian Science vs. Bible," followed by a series of quotations from the Bible and the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy. The apparent object of the interrogatories and comparisons taken from Mrs. Eddy's book is to discredit the teachings of Christian Science by the use of brief excerpts and incomplete sentences, destroying the full meaning contained in a given paragraph. Our critics need only to turn to page 497 of Science and Health, and there read the religious tenets of the Christian Science organization; in particular, the first and third tenets, which read as follows:

"As adherents of Truth, we take the inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life."

"We acknowledge God's forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin and the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as unreal. But the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts."

Sin, being an illusion, is destroyed through the simple process of mankind's exercising their God-given dominion, displacing a false belief or wrong thought with a true conception of what man is as God's image and likeness, spiritual and perfect; not the base counterfeit which would seek to delude and to kindle sentiment to follow other paths, short cuts along better marked highways to salvation at a reduced price per milepost.

Mortal man would make sin and disease a reality, but man is immortal, spiritual. Viewing man from this angle he is perfect, not subject to the ills of the flesh. When Jesus met the ten lepers on the road to Jerusalem, he did not see sick and sinful men, but God's perfect likeness. The plaintive cry emanating from their lips, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us," has since echoed and reechoed around the world, seeking succor and hope for humanity. The compassionate and exalted thought of the Master issued no challenge, asking when and how they had sinned, but through his higher understanding that the divine Mind transforms mortals through Truth, error and evil were shorn of supposititious power, and the divine Mind was recognized as the only Mind. "This process of higher spiritual understanding," we read in Science and Health (p. 251), "improves mankind until error disappears, and nothing is left which deserves to perish or to be punished."

Through the discovery of Christian Science an increased number of people throughout the civilized world have taken up an earnest study of the Bible; its pages have been illumined, and primitive Christianity has been restored to those hungering and thirsting after righteousness. The new-old religion is released from the cloistered cell of creeds and dogmas, with this "key" to the Scriptures, Science and Health. The Bible becomes at once the Scientist's daily guide. Studied in connection with the Christian Science textbook, it gives up its treasures, and all true Christian Scientists are vindicating fearlessly and honestly the teachings inculcated therein.

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