Kindly permit me to correct a misrepresentation of Christian Science...

Byron B. Haviland, Committee on Publication for the State of Washington,

Spokesman-Review, Spokane

Kindly permit me to correct a misrepresentation of Christian Science which appeared in the Spokesman-Review of October 26. As quoted, a doctor delivered a brilliant and masterful address in support of the Eighteenth Amendment. He protested any effort to repeal existing prohibition laws, denounced the breaking of marriage covenants, and declared that "sin and unbelief in God are the motivating power behind such movements."

The doctor's eloquent denunciation of these evils reached a sorry anticlimax, however, when he turned aside to misrepresent those who differ from his method of attacking sin, as witnessed by his reference to Christian Science as a cult, and similar to Mohammedanism and Judaism, and when he made the misleading claim that Christian Science ignores sin.

Such statements are far from fact, as will readily be seen by anyone who open-mindedly reads the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy. Christian Science is the Science of Christianity which Jesus practiced so efficaciously in his healing ministry. "Christianity as Jesus taught it," Mrs. Eddy writes (p. 135) in the above-mentioned textbook, "was not a creed, nor a system of ceremonies, nor a special gift from a ritualistic Jehovah; but it was the demonstration of divine Love casting out error and healing the sick, not merely in the name of Christ, or Truth, but in demonstration of Truth, as must be the case in the cycles of divine light."

Christian Science teaches the allness of God, and in accord with the Bible declares that all that God made is good. In this sense, Christian Science denies the reality of evil or its existence as any part of God's creation. While sin is no part of reality, or God's creation, it constitutes the wrong thinking of mortals, and the scientific way to destroy it is, in the words of Paul, "by the renewing of [the] mind."

Proof that Christian Scientists do not ignore sin, but detect and destroy it in the only effectual way, is shown by the following Tenets from page 497 of the textbook:

"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."

"And we solemnly promise to watch, and pray for that Mind to be in us which was also in Christ Jesus; to do unto others as we would have them do unto us; and to be merciful, just, and pure."

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