Ignoring the example of the Master, a pastor, according...

Aaron E. Brandt—Kittanning, Pa.

Simpson's Leader

Ignoring the example of the Master, a pastor, according to a recent issue of the Leader, preached a sermon consisting mostly of misrepresentations regarding the religion known as Christian Science. He referred to it as a fraud and a counterfeit.

Permit me to say in reply that Christian Science organizations now number more than eighteen hundred; that among their memberships and adherents are some of the most intelligent people of the world, including editors, judges, lawyers, physicians, and clergymen. Instead of a fraud and a counterfeit they find it to be an interpretation of the Scriptures which is free from theological dogmas and altogether spiritual and logical. This pastor cannot hope to stay the progress of Christian Science by maligning it or its revered Discoverer and Founder, Mrs. Eddy. She was respected and honored during her lifetime as few women have been honored, and that honor and respect increases as the manner of her life and the importance of her teaching become better known.

The reverend critic, it is found, has based his attack largely on what may be termed half truths. Now Tennyson defined the nature of half truths in "The Grandmother," and it is quite certain that they do not improve in character or become more worthy of respect when coming from the mouth or pen of one wearing the garment of a minister of the gospel of Truth.

One of the critic's half truths is that "Christian Science does not believe there is such a thing as sin, hell, or death." What a hideous impression such a statement must give of Christian Science to those uninformed of its scientific and true teaching, conveying as it does the thought that it is quite proper to indulge in all kinds of evil. Christian Science insists that sin and all evil must be overcome, as the Bible teaches, in order to escape the wages of sin resulting in hell and death. Mrs. Eddy was one of those "who feel great truths, and tell them;" and she found that "the truth of truths is love." Therefore with a true and saving love for humanity she wrote in Science and Health (p. 203), "Sin kills the sinner and will continue to kill him so long as he sins."

Christian Science does not stop at merely pointing out the necessity for overcoming. It teaches how material thought, resulting in all sin, sickness, disease, ignorance, poverty, corruption, and death can, and ultimately will, be overcome by an understanding of spiritual reality. The Bible, when understood, plainly teaches from beginning to end that there is only one God, who has created all; that what He created is spiritual and therefore wholly and eternally good. Christian Science logically concludes that all materiality and evil, not being a creation of God, has only such an apparent existence as is comprised in human belief, or what Paul calls the carnal mind; and that all matter, sin, disease, hell, death, and suffering, are erroneous mental states. The greatest thinkers of the world have caught glimpses of this truth, from the remote times when Chinese sages declared that there is nothing external to consciousness, down to the present when Professor Fiske, a lecturer at Harvard University, states that "all the qualities of matter are what the mind makes them, and have no existence as such apart from the mind. . . . Apart from consciousness there is no such thing as color, form, position, or hardness, and there is no such thing as matter."

It remained, however, for Mrs. Eddy to discover the great truth that all material phenomena and evil are humanly mental, while all reality is spiritually mental. Beyond question Christ Jesus defined evil as mental when he said that it proceeds out of the heart of human beings. Christian Science thus strikes successfully at the very source of evil; namely, the belief of its reality. Without such belief sin and evil could no longer continue.

From the above it ought to be plain, and it is plain to every one who understands the subject, that Christian Science is not pantheistic, as alleged. It is the very opposite of that doctrine. "Pantheism presupposes that God sleeps in the mineral, dreams in the animal, and wakes in a wicked man" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 257). And just as plain is it to anyone who is familiar with Doctor Quimby's method of healing, that his physical manipulations of the patient, and mesmeric passes, in no way even resemble Christian Science teaching and practice. Before the discovery of Christian Science, which occurred after Doctor Quimby's decease, Mrs. Eddy supposed that his manner of healing had a mental science back of it, and said so, although he himself made no such claim. When she discovered her mistake she corrected it, and the critic should be equally just. The Christian Science Journal of 1887 contains an account of this mind-healing history which proves that the truths of Christian Science were by no means gained from Doctor Quimby.

All the teaching and practice of Jesus confirm the truth contained in the following statement of Mrs. Eddy in Science and Health (p. 469): "The exterminator of error is the great truth that God, good, is the only Mind, and that the supposititious opposite of infinite Mind — called devil or evil — is not Mind, is not Truth, but error, without intelligence or reality. There can be but one Mind, because there is but one God; and if mortals claimed no other Mind and accepted no other, sin would be unknown."

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