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CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

AND ITS PROBLEMS

Bv J. H. BATES, PH.M.

AI.^C -LAIWARD
THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY
CAMBRIDGE. MASS.

EATON & MAINS,

1898.

Eaton & Mains Press,
150 Fifth Avenue, New York.

^ '^ ».' ,j fy

INTRODUCTION

"Tbaoheb, we want a sign from yow," Thus
the Pharisees set up their own Messianic stand-
ard. Casting out demons was to them a sign
from helL If he was the Messiah, they demanded
a sign in the heavens. They had no use for
truth that cut the cords of the mind, nor for
sinlessness, nor for potent holiness, nor for love
that reconciled the soul to God. He must shake
the heavens with his power and fill them with
his glory to authenticate his divine mission.
Jesus ''sighed in his spirit,'' and called them
an adulterous and unbelieving generation.

Thus it has ever been — ^no "sign" within the
circle of human life, no revelation of God in the
natural working of the mind, no light of love
transforming the spirit that shows us the face of
Jesus Christ, has silenced the demand for prodi-
gies of divine power. There must be some ex-
ternal manifestation of omnipotence, crushing
through all natural law, to convince us that God
is still aliva Hence natural phenomena have

often been interpreted as miraculous, and the

Introduction

Church for ages before the Reformation supplied
the faithful with relics and charms and magic to
maintain the " faith once delivered to the saints."
The Protestant world, while rejecting relics, has
often resorted to faith cure in its various forms
as a substitute for Romish fetichea When we
insist that normal cures are proof that the salva-
tion of Christ has its physical beneficence as well
as its spiritual, that it corrects all human life, still
the cry is set up for sudden violent displays of
supernatural power, to the exclusion of the grad-
ual processes of recovery which are in harmony
with natura The question may very justly be
raised. Did God establish nature for the sole pur-
pose of revealing himself by violating its order,
or has he performed miracles that we might know
him as the Lord of nature, the miracles being
only a violation of "superficial uniformity in the
interest of deeper law ? " *

Christian Science is a form of faith cure so
extreme that it has been invariably criticised as
neither Christian nor scientific. It certainly is
not in harmony with the fundamental truths of
Christianity, and it wages ceaseless conflict with

* Gore, IneamaHon of the Son of Ood^ p. 60.

Introduction

the spirit and results of all approved scienca
Hence, we cannot but regard the name as mis-
leading and without excuse. To this " science "\
the laws of health are but a delusion and a snare ;
the study of physiology and hygiene cultivates
mortal mind with all its repulsive offspring; mat-
ter is nothing; even the body is an unreality
and false belief ; sensation is an illusion because
nerves cannot feel ; all else is but a reflection of
God, who is the only reality. Just what MrsT
Eddy means by reality she nowhere makes clear,

j It is hard to imagine the denial of the actual ex-

: istence of material things on the part of one who
eats with a relish, builds fires against the winter's

: cold, walks through the open doors instead of
through the closed windows, and treats our pres-

' ent environment exactly as others treat it It is
much easier to suppose that by reality is meant
enduring existence, which the scientist ascribes to
God alone; but this would hardly account for
the rejection of the conditions of our present life
as whoUy a "false belief of mortal mind." Her
denial of the reality of the world of sense and ex-
perience is not only categorical, but it is also

woven into the entire texture of her theory of

Introduction

healtli, and with it her scheme must stand or
fall

This little book is an investigation of themes
brought again to the surface by Christian Science.
Statements of Christian doctrine will be found
side by side with the principles of Mrs. Eddy's
scheme. Truth has a self-evidencing power; it
goes home to the mind with a native energy ; it
never returns to God void. I have therefore
shunned all labored polemics while conducting
this discussion in the interest of truth.

Controversy in these pages, however, is sub-
sidiary to the search for health in the profound-
est sense — ^health pervading the whole sphere of
life ; indeed, it cannot long continue anything less.
A diseased imagination is inimical to a healthy
stomach. Dyspepsia is a relentless enemy of a
sound mind. Body and mind are most intimately
related. We no longer divide man into com-
partments like a steamship. He is a unity with
whom it cannot be well in any imaginary depart-
ment of his being and ill with him in any other.
Life is one, and the infraction of it at any point
mars its harmony throughout It is as essential

that we should think clearly and love religiously

Introduction

to be well in the best sense as that we should
have a good digestion. The true physician is not
a mere drug doctor. He who treats the sick
must take into account psychic and ethical forces
as well as chemical. Half the dissatisfaction
with doctors arises from their obloquy to spirit-
ual facts. They treat a fraction of a man, not his
integral being. But this class of physicians is
constantly diminishing as the knowledge of man
increases. The study of the relation of mind and
body is bringing new factors of health into view
which the doctors are quick to appreciate. A
new science of therapeutics will soon incorpo-
rate these psychic facts and forces, and once more
the physician will find his nearest and truest
coadjutor in the minister of the Gospel In the
meantime the laity, holding fast its faith in true
science, may well avoid "the profane pratings
and oppositions of falsely-named knowledge —
which some professing concerning the faith have
missed the mark I " * (1 Tim. vi, 20.)

> See Greek text, W. and H.

CONTENTS

PAGI

I. Thb Imhanbncb of God 11

n. Life 21

ni. Thb Philosophy of Chkistian Science 85

I. **Matter is Nothing" 37

n. Tlie Mortal Mind 44

in. God 48

ly. Fundamental Principles. 55

V. Science 68

VI. Evil 64

Vn. Proof Texts 75

rV. The Cubes 89

Christianity and Health 121

The Immanence of God

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

AND

ITS PROBLEMS

The Immanence of God

WHAT we think about God will determine
all other thought The universe from
the view-point of pantheism or of deism is not
the same universe that is seen from the view-
point of Christian theism. To the pantheist there
is nothing but God ; to the deist matter is a reality
moved by second causes, from which God is far
separated; to the Christian theist God is more
than the sum of all things, but he is very inti-
mately present with all things, so that all energy
is an immediate manifestation of God.

A true conception of God can be derived from
neither pantheism nor deism alone. Pantheism
dishonors the personality ; deism, the omnipres-
ence of God ; to the one he is identified with the
universe; to the other he is distinct from all
things, and outside the world he has created;

each has its lessons, deism emphasizing the

Christian Science and its Problems

divine transcendence ; pantheism, the divine im-
manence.

It is not surprising that a tinge of deism colors
the average Christian thought of God to-day. In
the third century Latin Christianity broke away
from the more rational theism of the Alexandrian
school, and began the development of a system
of anthropomorphism which has very largely
ruled theology up to a very recent time. God
was supposed to be too exalted in his perfections
to come into immediate touch with human life;
hence a series of intermediaries — virgin, saints,
pope, and priests — was placed between God and
the soul. Theories of atonement and whole sys-
tems of theology were built on this conception,
from which Christian Science is a symptom of a
somewhat wholesome revulsion.

The thought of the Alexandrian school was
more closely in keeping with God's self-disclo-
sure as recorded in both the Old and the New
Testament Scriptures. Clement of Alexandria
said that God is in all human life ; that he an-
ticipated Christ and prepared for him through
Greek philosophy, as well as through Jewish
prophets ; he was incarnated in Christ and through
him in the whole human race ; Christ had been
in the world before he came in the flesh to pre-
pare it for his visible advent ; he was organically

related to the human soul, hence " the image of

The Immanence of God

God in man is a spiritual endowment of human-
ity which is capable of expressing the inmost
essence or character of God ; " ** the image of God
in every man constitutes the warrant for believing
that he may rise from the possibility into the
actuality, that the image may develop into a living
and speaking resemblance." The indwelling
Deity, in Clement's view, is the educator of the
race, the end of whose educational discipline is
redemption.'

The biblical conception of God gave strong
warrant to these views. Had not the psalmist
said: ** Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or
whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I as-
cend up into heaven, thou art there : if I make
my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art thera If I
take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the
uttermost parts of the sea ; even there shall thy
hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me."
Had not Isaiah declared, " We are the clay and
thou art the potter?" and Jeremiah, "Am la
God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar
off ? Do not I fill heaven and earth ? saith the
Lord? " And did not St John affirm, " In the be-
ginning was the Word, . . . without him was
not anything made that was made. His life is
the light of men . . . that lighteth every man

1 C<nUinuUy of Christian Thought^ p. 48.

Christian Science and its Problems

that Cometh into the world ? " St Paul also says,
" In him we live, and move, and have our being ; "
and Christ taught the same great truth in his
prayer, "That they all may be one, . . . even
as we are one, ... I in them and thou in me,
that they may be made perfect in one."

Science has again brought into prominence the
doctrine of the divine immanence. While it was
possible to conceive of the world as a fabricated
product at a particular period of time, it was also
possible to conceive of God as a great mechanic,
a carpenter, or a clock-builder, standing utterly
aloof from his work; but the discovery that
creation is a continuous process was attended by
the self -revelation of the immanent God. Energy
in its protean forms, force in its persistence, would
admit of no definition that left God out The
only force we know in the last analysis is will ;
hence, if matter addresses us only through force,
when we are dealing with matter we are dealing
with the immanent God.

Philosophy teaches us to seek the unity of the
world in God. Some form of monism, or the
effort to reduce the world to a consistent unitary
conception, has been almost universally enter-
tained by philosophic thought A fundamental
pluralism is offensive to the reason. Interaction,
law, system, demand a unitary being which posits

and maintains them in their mutual relations.

The Immanence of God

"Is this one unmanent or transcendent?" asks
Professor Bowna We might reply by asking
for a definition of the terms. It would be ab-
surd to take them spatially, as if immanent meant
inside and transcendent outside ; a fancy, how-
ever, which seems to underlie not a few utterances
on this subject The one cannot be conceived as
• the sum of the many, nor as the stuff out of which
the many are made; neither does it depend on
the many, but, conversely, the many depend on
it In this sense the one is transcendent Again,
the many are not spatially outside the one, nor a
pendulous appendage of the one ; but the one is
the ever-present power in and through which the
many exist In this sense the one is immanent
The alleged impossibility of transcending the uni-
verse is another form of the same verbalism. In
the sense defined we must transcend it; in any
other sense there is no need of transcending it
In modern thought substantiality has been re-
placed or defined by causality. A world sub-
stance, as dintinguished from a world cause, is a
product of the imagination which vanishes before
criticism. For the explanation of the system we
need a cause which shall not be this, that, or the
other thing, but an omnipresent agent by which
all things exist*

* PhUotophy of TJmtm^ pp. 69, 60.
(2) 17

Christian Science and its Problems

There is a happy accordance between this con-
clusion of philosophy and modern theology. The
Deity of Latin theology is an otiose God — idle,
at ease, contemplating his own glory. It is true
that there are flashes of the divine immanence in
St Augustine and in many of his successors, but
the tendency was to separate God from his world.
On the other hand, present-day theology finds
God in his world. Thus Dr. Charles Hodge says :
/"God fills immensity with his presence. His
omnipresence is the infinitude of his being, viewed
in relation to his creatures. He is equally present
with all his creatures, at all times and all places.
He is not far from any one of us. . . . Nor is
this omnipresence to be understood as a mere
presence in knowledge and power. It is an omni-
presence of the divine essence. Otherwise the
essence of God would be limited." * The words
of Dr. Fairbaim are not less explicit: "If we be-
lieve in a living God, we surely believe in a God
who lives; but God does not live unless he
is every moment and in every atom as active
and as much present as he was in the very hour
and article of creation." ' Professor Bruce, in his
Apologetics^ says : " To Christian faith the world
is not a machine to which God stands related as
an artisan, with which, the more it approaches

* Hodge's Theology y vol. i, p. 888.

' Place of Christ in Modem Theology, p. 417.

The Immanence of God

perfection, the less he has to do. It is rather an
organism of which God is, as it were, the living
soul." An effective putting of the doctrine will
be found in Liux Mundi: "Slowly but surely
that theory of the world (the deistical) has been
. undermined. The one absolutely impossible
conception of God, in the present day, is that
which represents him as an occasional visitor.
Science has pushed the deist's God farther and
farther away, and at the moment when it seemed
as if he would be thrust out all together Darwin-
ism appeared, and under the disguise of a foe
did the work of a friend. It has conferred upon
philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit by
showing us that we must choose between two al-
ternatives. Either God is everywhere present in
nature or he is nowhere. He cannot be here and
not there. He cannot delegate his power to
demigods called 'second causes.* In nature
everything must be his work or nothing. We
must frankly return to the Christian view of di-
rect divine agency, the immanence of divine
power in nature from end to end, the belief in a
God in whom not only we, but all things, have
their being, or we must banish him altogether.
It seems as if, in the providence of God, the mis-
sion of modem science was to bring home to our
unmetaphysical ways of thinking the great truth

of the divine immanence in creation, which is not

Christian Science and its Problems

less essential to the Christian idea of God than to
a philosophical view of nature. And it comes to
us almost like a new truth, which we cannot at
once fit in with the old." *

It is important that we should understand the
position of modem theology with regard to this
fundamental doctrine. It has an important bear-
ing on the development of a sound theory of life
and health, and we shall see as we proceed how
Christian Science diverges from it and loses sight
of a personal God.

> Liiz Mtmdif p. 82.
20

Life

life

Life

^KfEITHER sickness nor death can be predi-
J cated of God, and if we may rely upon the
analogy of nature, where variations from the
parental form attain " survival values," and thus
acquire a kind of immortality, we also may an-
ticipate a time when we shall attain a deathless
state. This is characteristic of nature's move-
ment toward perfection — what is worthy to en-
dure survives, and thus the whole life is exalted
by the improvement of its individual factors.

Eternal life proceeds from a perfect corre-^
spondence between the soul and God. Death in
nature is not annihilation ; it is the gateway to life.
This is the lesson of the tiny cell, the most primi-
tive form of life, and it is a lesson constantly re-
peated in nature as we ascend the scale of being
up to man. But at this point death acquires a
moral function. What had been heretofore a
natural force is appropriated by the moral order,
and may now operate either as a blessing or as a
curse. By man's abuse of life death clothes it-
self with terrors, and acquires a kind of punitive
character. This shall all pass away when man has
entered into perfect correspondence with God.

True, death may still have a place and function

Christian Science and its Problems

as the means of "disentangling this body, in
which the old order ends, from the spiritual, in
which the new order begins," but no longer will
its face be clothed with horrors.

Man was made for life, and death is his servant
The whole movement of life from the beginning
was toward a consummation in man. The ap-
pearance of a living cell in the process of crea-
tion, while it was a transformation of a startling
character, was no violent break with nature. To
it the nebulous mists looked forward with pro-
phetic anticipation. The swiriing fire-cloud
began the preparation for it Suns spread their
dazzling beams ; light gleamed on igneous rocks ;
wind and wave swept shore and forest; the
mineral world bedecked itself with jewels; the
mountains gathered their provident stores of fuel ;
and the subtle chemistries of nature made ready
for the great event — ^the birth of a living cell

But how shall we account for all this stir of
preparation? Who gave this prophetic power to
what we call the azoic world ? And from whence
came motion, that set the atoms dancing among
themselves, that drove the winds from their fast-
nesses, that pulsed the tides of the great deep ?
Surely there was life here, though it veiled itself
in all the forms of matter. There was life before
the cell — a foreseeing, purposing, loving, and om-

y nipotent life.

Ute

"In the beginning," says Genesis, "the Spirit
of God moved upon the face of the waters."
Thenceforth the earth was no inanimate clod.
The dry land appeared, vegetation, the inhabit-
ants of land and water, and finally man, the con-
summation of creation. God made it alL But
what was the method of creation ? Genesis has
no answer, save that it emphasizes the order and
the divine origin of the sublime procesa

Science carries us back to a microscopic cell,
which it recognizes as the starting point of man.
Here in the amoeba he begins his race, his en-
dowments, his acquisitions. Here he develops
digestive power and the beginning of nerve tis-
sue. Worms start the construction of his body
in compact, definite form ; jSshes supply the spinal
column, insects and vertebrates contribute the
brain, and man lifts up his head the true Greek
anthropos. But the mystery of this marvelous
evolution grows deeper and darker until we rec-
ognize the inmian ence o f God. The unfolding
of the most rudimentary forms of life was a dis-
closure of God, who was still further revealed in
each ascending stage until his image appeared in
man.

There was then no gulf in nature between the
first cell and its antecedents or consequents ; it
was the outcome of the world that preceded it,
the parent of the world that followed. It, too,

Christian Science and its Problems

was prophetic. It looked forward to higher
unfoldings until it consummated in man. From
the first movement of the macrocosm to the birth
of the self-determining, godlike human mind
there was a continuous manifestation of life,
and man himself is its highest revelation. Like
it, of it, in a sense, and yet apart from it, he still
refreshes the streams of his life from God, whose
presence has attended his existence in every form,
and with whom he enters now into the most ex-
alted relationship.

Thus we are a part of the universal life, from
which we seek to separate ourselves by artificial
partitions. It is indeed hard for us to enter into
the abounding life of nature ; we have given up
so large a part of this world to dead matter and
cold, blind force. To uncritical thought every-
thing is lifeless save the scattered flora and fauna
that appear upon earth's surface. The move-
ments of nature are to us like the grinding of a
great machine ; every part stamped out like the
wheels of a modem watch, impelled by " second
causes," but God is not in it. This is the phenom-
enal world, beyond which we never think. We
live upon the superficial crust of things. The
real world lies beyond, and can be entered only
by the mind. This is the occult, the noumenal
world, to which our minds are directed by birth

and death, by the instincts of our spiritual life,

life

and by all the lessons of religion. Once haying
passed the sphere of our own misconceptions and
deformed creations, we find ourselves in the
kingdom of life. Here there is no death. There
is change, there is tropical movement, there is
exuviation of the old things, but there is no ces-
sation nor diminution of life itself.

We should have faith in life. Faith is the
bond of union with God and is one of the earliest
and most radical of soul powers. It is the power
of the integral soul to see, the exercise of reason
in the larger sense. It is knowledge, we may say,
the highest knowledge, making constantly real to
the mind what is not seen by the eye. The
children of the forest witnessed to the earliest
powers of faith. They never doubted a spiritual
presence behind the forms of natura With-
out questioning they accepted the power of
invisible agencies over life. With them it was
true that the instincts and intuitions of the soul
exercised a much larger influence than the dis-
cursive reason. All the older religions bear wit-
ness to this fact While Adam participated in
the simplicity of life without questioning it was
well with him, but when he sought to solve the
mystery of good and evil, to make a world for
himself, he was placed without the gates of para-
dise, and flaming cherubim forbade his return.

He had entered the world of artificiality ; he was

Christian Science and its Problems

separated from life. The early history of the
Aryans is a repetition of the same fact Theirs
was a submission to the simplicity of nature, to
the current of its deepest life. Witness the fol-
lowing Orphic hymn :

" Render us always flourishing, always happy,
O, household fire ! Thou who art eternal, beauti-
ful, always young, thou who nourishest, thou who
art rich, receive our offerings with good will and
give us in return the happiness and health which
are so sweet"

The spirit of all this simple faith was finally
paralyzed by the addition of religious rites. The
Greeks enjoyed at first much of the Aryan sim-
plicity and confident trust in nature, but each
addition to their mythology, each new sect that
sprang up, diverted the Greek life more and more
from the channels of nature into artificial human
trenches. The same course marks the early re-
ligious history of Egypt and Assyria. The hu-
manly devised scheme of life covers up and
stifles the soul. The whole course of Christian
history is a remarkable illustration of this tend-
ency. The art of Christ has been distorted and
obscured by the artifice of the Church. Creeds,
devised with ever so good an intent, and per-
forming no little service in their way, have,
nevertheless, hidden the simplicity that is in

Christ Weary of the problems of metaphysical

Ufe

theology, of a benumbing scholasticism, we wel-
come the call of the age that turns us back again
to the archetypal, historical, and immanent
Christ Not that we shall never come to see
truth again in these integumentary doctrines
which we now seek to strip off ; not for a more
confined view, but for keener insight and broader
comprehension of religious truth, we now turn
back for more intimate communion with the
Christ of the ages. Thus the lesson is repeated ;
we must have faith — faith that sees and realizes
the enduring truth; faith in the unseen, in both^
the universe without and that within ourselves,
in nature ; for with all our science we have not
changed it ; in the inscrutable forces that roll on
without reck of time and that seek to carry us
with them ; in life, in God.

Shall we think without system? Surely not,
for we can see system everywhere in divinely
ordained nature. What is the earth but a sys-
tem? What is man but a system? And so is
every man. We are a part of a great system
" which has skeleton and framework as well as
blood and nerves ; which has actions and reac-
tions, mechanical as well as chemical ; which has
measures and compensations and coordinations
and times and seasons, and whose gravities re-
veal its subtle attractions. This is the life which

God has himself ordained, a life organic and

Christian Science and its Problems

structural, whicli has system — ^nay, a series of
systems — not only consistent in space, but suc-
cessive in time." '

But the system must be flexible and subordi-
nate to the life which it infolds. It must be
capable of mutation even to submergence in a
higher system. It is not system, it is not creed,
jper se, that has been the extinction of life, but
rather the conservation of system as something
of prime importance. Even the holy temple of
the Jews became a godless structure when it
came to be guarded by priests. That is a mis-
taken faith that clutches the material symbol
instead of the thing symbolized. There is a
somewhat, real and undiminishing, beyond all
our human modes of expressing it, that is the
true object of faith. It is God, and in him is
abounding life in which by faith we participate,
and that is the antithesis of disease.

It is mistrust and fear that have diseased us,
and that largely maintain that disharmony from
which proceed all our human ills. What is there
of life to him who goes forth into God*s world with
a doubting heart? To such a one there is no
peace with himself, no peace with man, with na-
ture, nor with God. And more, he is a corrupter
of men; he infests the community with his

> God in His World, p. 68.
80

Life

deadly virus. Like an escaped patient of the
pesthouse, he carries infection in his toucL In-
deed, some such a leper must have stalked abroad
through all communities, for how widespread is
this leprosy of unbelief I How dark is the
shadow it casts on every face we meet I With
what a cuirass it loads down every man who goes
forth into his self-imposed warfare! Could we
expect health in such a world? It was a very
ancient disciple of jEsculapius that advised cheer-
fulness as a cure for sickness. No intelligent
disciple of any modem school of medicine has
ever discountenanced his prescription. But how
shall cheerfulness abound without faith ? Is it
the disciple of pessimism who has turned to be
the apostle of hope? Surely faith in life is the
wellspring of hope, of aspiration, and endeavor.
He who enjoys the divine serenity of faith has
entered on the way of health, and let him ever
hold before his mind these words: Now abide
these four, faith, hope, love, and cheerfulness.

Faith, again, gives us a true insight that saves
us from the misleading of unsophisticated reason.
Disease and death have a superficial appearance
of terror, but faith sees that when they are not
self-imposed they are not alien to life. If disease
is only the natural integument of death, then it
involves the whole process of life. We cannot
move the body without the occurrence of both

Christian Science and its Problems

death and birth in the muscular tissua Every
thought that goes burning through the brain is
attended by death. It was death that ushered
us into the world, and at each new stage of our
progress the old and mortal coil has been shuffled
off. Even before man appeared on the globe
the preparation for his coming involved the dis-
solution of a countless series of organisms, and
even the inorganic world for the same purpose
produced and destroyed multitudes of beautiful
forms. Death is not annihilation ; to the eye of
faith it is only the occultation of life, which reap-
pears fresh and glorious. The entire future of
man in all worlds is dependent on death — the
angel of life.

Faith brings us close to nature without the
imposition of our own interpretation of its mean-
ing. Dogmatism is averse to lifa It is the at-
tempt to put life in a mold, to measure it by the
conceits of the individual mind. It is the proc-
ess by which each little mind makes a world for
itself. Even the world that we call supernatural
is too often a product of the human mind. Such
perversions do not change nature, they only di-
vert us still more from truth with what is unreal
A search in the simplicity of childhood for the
true meaning of nature is healthful and life-giv-
ing. What, then, must be the consequence when

we paint nature with the false colors of our own

Ufe

minA It is complacency in the perversion of
nature that explains the use of certain drugs.
Alcohol, morphine, cocaine, remove their vic-
tims as far as possible from the world of reality,
and hasten a state of moritura. They are
danger signals warning us to cast off every ves-
tige of simulation, and to accept God's world as
he made it

All willful separation from nature is sin, be-
cause nature is one with our highest life. The
movement toward spiritual perfection — indeed,
toward all perfection — is profoundly natural It
is sinful to turn the balance of choice toward an
inferior grade of life ; it is a rupture with the im-
manent God, who is vitally one with all the
genetic processes of nature, and is as necessary to
man as to the crystal or the flower. To break with
God is to cut the cords of life ; to deny him is to
lose the poise of soul. Sin is ethical disease, the
root of all disease. Sin and disease are stern
facts in this world, and either presents a subject
too serious to be treated by magic. The image
of God in man foretells possible rupture and con-
flict with the divine Spirit Man is so complete
in his structure, so distinct in his personality,
that it is possible for him to resist even God.
This is a luminous fact in human consciousness.
No jugglery will ever deprive man of the convic-
tion that he is the cause of the sin and moral evil
(8) 88

Christian Science and its Problems

of the world. Keturning to God again, like a
wandering prodigal, drinking once more from the
fountain of life, will be to mind and body re-crea-
tive and medicinal.

So far we have been considering the Christian
view of God and life; Christian Science takes
another view. Let us now inquire to what extent

it is a perversion of the trutL

The Philosophy of Christian

The Philosophy of Christian Science

I. '* Matter is Nothing."

THEKE is an inside and an outside to every-
thing, and knowledge requires not only eye-
sight, but insight The heavens spread before
the eyes are not the astronomical heavens ; they
are only the raw material which the astronomer
has mentally construed and interpreted. Thus
in all the forms of matter the senses are first ad-
dressed, and then the mind draws its own infer-
ences from the sense perceptions. But neither
science nor philosophy denies anything which the
senses give. What is discovered by sense is real,
but it is not the whole of reality ; it is the foun-
dation on which rational thought builds up its
system of reality. "However real the outer
world may be, the mind can grasp that world only

through the conception it forms of it" *

The concern oi the mind is to find what is

called the "universal predicates of the real in

thought — that is, those predicates which all

thinkers affirm under the same circumstances."

This is what Ferrier calls " the common to all,"

and not merely "the special to me."

* For a luminous statement of this truth see James's Psychology^

vol. ii, p. 636.

Christian Science and its Problems

The following statements concerning the " noth-
ingness of matter " are taken from Science and
Health, They fairly represent Mrs. Eddy's posi-
tion:

"The realm of the real is spiritual. The
opposite of spirit is matter, and the opposite of the
real is the unreal, or material. Matter is an error
of statement This error in the premise leads to
errors in the conclusion, in every statement into
which it enters. Nothing we can say or believe
regarding matter is true, except that matter is
unreal, and is therefore a belief, which has its be-
ginning and ending " (p. 173).

*^ Not a glimpse or manifestation of spirit is
obtainable through matter " (p. 66).

" The theories that I combat are these : (1)
that all is matter ; (2) that matter originates in
mind, and is as real as mind, possessing intelli-
gence and life. The first theory, that matter is
everything, is quite as reasonable as the second,
that mind and matter coexist and cooperate.
One only of the following statements can be true :
(1) that everything is matter ; (2) that everything
is mind. Which one is it? " (p. 166.)

Mrs. Eddy's conception of matter has very little
affinity with idealism, whether it be a true ideal-
ism that has a deep and genuine respect for the
natural order and for experience, or with a sub-
jective idealism like that of Fichte. With him

The Philosophy of Christian Science

matter was the condition of our common tasks,
something that each one creates for himself, but
also in common with others. It is a real product
of the mind, although not real in itself. With-
out it we dream; we are delirious because we
cannot work in common, and hence we cannot be
effectively righteous. For this reason some have
thought that Fichte's system might better be
called *^ ethical idealism in its extremest expres-
sion." But it will be noted that, while Fichte in-
sists on the necessity of a sense world as a com-
mon mental creation, the condition of ethical
activity, Mrs. Eddy denies the reality of such a
world, and describes it as a delusive fiction, a
product of mortal mind.

There is, again, a wide divergence between her
teachings and those of Spinoza, who calls the ma-
terial world body, or bodily substance, and the
inner world of thought thinking substance,
or mind. These two worlds were to him *' equally
real, equally revelations of the one absolute truth,
equally divine, equally full of God."

Berkeley has been charged with a philosophical
idealism that denied the reality of matter, and of
him Byron wrote :

** When Bishop Berkeley said there is no matter
It was no matter what he said ; "

and yet the famous idealist contended only for the

doctrine that matter has no reality apart from mind.

Christian Science and its Problems

Thus it appears that when Mrs. Eddy asserts
that " matter is nothing " she stands alone. Her
dictum arises from the exigencies of her scheme
of mental healing. Matter is denied reality, not
because reason requires the denial, but because
disease and sickness are supposed to inhere in
matter, or in the mental conception of it, and
with the disappearance of the one the other, also,
is banished.

1 When Christian Science affirms that matter is
nothing it denies a predicate of thought of uni-
• versal validity. The reality of matter is not solely
a deliverance of sense ; it is also a determination
of the mind. The senses may give an imperfect
or superficial report of matter, but when the mind
interprets that report it determines for us the
highest possible reality of matter. It therefore
cannot be affirmed that objective matter is " a
sham, a mockery, an illusion, or even a lie ; it is
a revelation."

Philosophers now generally agree that matter

cannot be defined as substance in the sense of

self-existence. God only is substance. Hence

the theory that atoms are discrete entities, which

underlies the materialistic view of the universe,

is gradually giving way to the energistic theory

which speaks of matter in the terms of energy.

It is true there is no passive matter in itself ; nor

is it possible to conceive of force in itself as

The Philosophy of Christian Science

separate from its activity. Matter is a manifesta-
tion of forca Thus Professor Ostwald, of Leip-
sic, says:' "The supposition that all natural
phenomena can be traced back primarily to
mechanical factors cannot even be designa-
ted as an available working hypothesis." " The
predicate of reality can be applied only to
energy."

If it be true that energy is known to us as a
living will, then matter is a revelation of God,
but not in any sense that negatives its reality.
Chemistry will justly continue to treat of atoms
and the formation of molecules, but we cannot
rationally follow the teachings of chemistry with-
out thinking of God."

Three tendencies have become marked in the
course of the history of thought The one is
that of pantheism, which makes God all; the
other is that of panegoism, which makes the soul
all ; finally, panmaterialism declares that there is ^
nothing but matter. This is the contradictory
of the error that matter is nothing. The truth
j seems to be in the recognition of matter as a
{ middle term between God and the soul. The
reality of the soul, God, and matter is a spontane-
ous faith, necessarily incomplete, often intellec-

' Popular Science Monthly^ March, 1896, art. " Failure of Scien-
tific Materialisin.*'

' Bowne, Metaphysics, p. 308.

Christian Science and its Problems

tually latent, but so universally prevalent that it
fells into the classification of what Ferrier calls
" the common to all." Undue emphasis on either
one of these terms unbalances life, which is only
good and happy in proportion to the due practi-
cal acknowledgment of all the threa

Matter as the middle term between God and
the soul is the medium of the divine self-revela-
I tion. The relation of the soul to the body is
a figure of the relation of God to the world. He
is incarnate in matter as the soul is incarnate in
the body. In the presence of external nature
we are in a condition " which is in analogy to
that in which we are when beside a human being
who is speaking to us, or otherwise making signs
that enable us to enter in some degree into his
thought" Thus the soul knows and communes
with God through matter.

In its search for unity the soul does not cast
matter aside and find reality only in God. Mon-
ism is a demand of the mind, but this demand is
not satisfied with a " one-substance " theory. It
requires only a " unitary or consistent conception
of the world." Such a " consistent conception "
requires that we should not attempt to think of
either God or man apart from matter. We are
confined to the data of experience. What may
be possible under conditions other than those of

our present existence we do not know, but in

The Philosophy of Christian Science

the world as we find it three realities, God,

matter, and the soul, are merged in an harmonious

unity.

There is no evidence that we shall ever exist

apart from matter. Existence as pure spirit is

inconceivable. The anticipation of purity of

soul, as a result of its separation from matter at

death, is based on the false notion of matter that

characterized the ancient heresy of Manicheism.

Matter is not evil; it is not something to be

got rid of; it is not "a false belief of mortal

mind," the source of our human woes. It must,

however, be interpreted in truth before we can

enjoy harmonious lifa Christian Science denies

matter, and hence, whatever may be its imme-

diate effect, it must ultimately produce discord

and disease.

Christian Science and its Problems

IL The Mortal Mind.

There is no life save in OodCs world. A
humanly devised world is more barren than
the igneous rocka That the human mind
must construe the world is evident upon a mo-
ment's reflection. The mind depends upon media
for its communication with the world. A bell is
tolling in a distant tower; the metal vibrates,
atmospheric waves are set in motion ; they reach
the ear and excite the nerves ; the nerves extend
to a certain brain center, where a record is made
of the nervous excitation. Thus the mind de-
pends on the media of atmosphere and nerves for
the phenomena of sound. But the subjective in-
terpretation must correspond to that of every
other normal mind. To construe sensations so
as to derive false mental products is to create a
fictitious world.

Still it remains true that the world to each of
us is mental. " In the interpretation of the exter-
nal world we rationalize our sense perceptions,
or we reduce the order of impressions to the order
of thought Not only do we interpret each sense
impression, but we combine the interpretations
derived from all the sense perceptions into a uni-
tary conception. This is our world. The process
of interpretation, however, will be somewhat

modified in each individual mind by heredity,

The Philosophy of Christian Science

environment, and education, so that the result
may differ more or less from reality. Is there, ^
then, any real external world? Is not the world
in each mind the only world ?

This is a question raised in the interest of ego-
ism, or the doctrine that there is nothing real but
the soul, and amounts to the affirmation that the
mind may construe the external world in con-
tempt of every sound mental principla Over
against such fantastic imaginations science gives
us an ideal structure which experience vindicates.
" A clear distinction is recognizable between the
* work of the mind ' which is my own arbitrary
production, and that which is not, between mere
ideas and scientific truth. . . . Knowledge, there-
fore, is knowledge, and scientific truth is truth." *

The Christian Scientist insists on constructing
his own world. He rejects all science and all
rational conclusions of the mind, and builds a ^
little world within himself according to his own
arbitrary principles. He enters on a life of self-
deception, which he inveterately maintains, a kind
of mental aberration which should be impossible.
He affirms that matter is nothing, although he .
employs it for food and clothing, and in all re-
spects treats the external world like other men. ,
Thus in the cultivation of mental delusions he
entera a life of unreality, full of contradictions,

^ Green, Philosophy^ p. 41.
45

Christian Science and its Problems

which can ultimate only in deterioration of the
mind. When he has cast out the " mortal mind '*
his last state will be worse than the first The
resultant will be a mortal mind of very small
capacity.

Christian Science is a bad form of bigotry.
The scientist assumes to know the truth, the exact
truth, the whole truth. Science and Health is his
text-book and Bible supplement lie is not and
cannot be in touch with any other system of
knowledge. Science to him is but a product of
mortal mind. lie can receive light only from his
own source. That cannot be questioned. The
system is nonexpansive. It is like cast iron — it
will break before it bends. It can absorb noth-
ing. The mind of its author indurated it at birth.

Hence the scientist must ever hold others in
haughty contempt, nor dare he have an inquiring
mind. He must shun all books but his own,
and all men but those of his own coterie. "We
weep because others weep, we yawn because
they yawn, and we have smallpox because oth-
ers have it ; but mortal mind contains and carries
the infection. When this mental contagion is
understood we shall be more careful of our com-
pany ; and we shall avoid the loquacious tattler
about disease as we should avoid the advocate of
crime."* This principle the scientist applies

* Science and Healthy p. 47.
46

The Philosophy of Christian Science

very generally. He must close his mind to the

talk of the thoroughfare, and guard himself in

passing the time of day with a neighbor. It

would never do to say, " How do you do ? " or,

" Are you well to-day? " This would be a fatal

recognition of the claim of mortal mind. For

him there is nothing but exclusiveness and self-

infoldment

Christian Science and its Problems

m. God.

The assertion that God is " principle," and not
personal, is fundamental in Mrs. Eddy*s scheme.
And yet she says, " God is personal, in its scien-
tific sense, but not in any anthropomorphic
sensa" That is, we must not ascend to the
knowledge of God from the knowledge of man.
" He is divine principle, supreme and incorporal
being, mind, spirit, soul, life, truth, love." These
terms, she says, are synonymous, and we are
left to infer that there are no shades of diflference
in their use. Spirit and soul are identical, so also
are soul and truth. The thought of God will
permit of no concrete expression ; abstract terms
are its only exponent But abstract tenns have
little value in satisfying man's religious need.
The noblest imagery is that which describes God
in terms of man. God's hand and eye and heart
portray relations of his Fatherhood to us. True,
such terms may convey only imperfect concep-
tions of God to the mind, but they cannot be
abandoned while we remain what we are. * * Thus
always men have imagined the divine after the
human pattern ; it is an inevitable idealism, and
if it be the greatest of illusions, it is one luminous
with all the light there is for us in the present
order of things." The transcendence of God thus

takes tangible form in the mind, and "without the

The Philosophy of Christian Science

transcendent relation of God, and our consequent
obligatory relation to him, all cultus shrinks
into mere subjective emotion and sentiment" *

This indeed is what becomes of Mrs. Eddy's
schema She probably intends to avoid panthe-
ism, but she leaves very little room for the divine
transcendence She declares that God is all, but
this is not equivalent to the proposition that God
is more than the sum of all things ; conversely
it ends practically in the identity of God with all
things. Thus she says, speaking of man : ** The
science of being shows it . . . impossible for man
to be a separate intelligence from his Maker " (p.
205) ; " The soul or mind of man is God " (p. 198) ;
and again : " The term souls, or spirits, is as im-
proper as the teiin gods. Soul, or spirit, signifies
deity, and nothing else " (p. 462). It is hardly
possible that such language can be construed in
harmony with a consistent theism.

Let us consider what we mean by personality.
I am a person — that is, I have power freely to de-
termine myself. I possess reason and can weigh
motives, in view of which I can direct the moral
course of my life. The substance of my being
I discover in my identity ; I am the same person
I have always been. I have desires that reach
beyond the mere acquisition of material things,
and will not be satisfied until I have found an-

^ Sterrett, Studies in HegeCs PhUosophy^ p. 66.
(4) 49

Christian Science and its Problems

other person as an end of life, an end in which my
entire personality may rest Thus the element
of love appears. It is the very self that loves,
and what I love in others is personality like my
own. Of all these facts I am conscious ; and thus
self-consciousness is at the base of personality.
No philosophy can deprive me of these elements
of personality, nor invalidate this source of knowl-
edge. It is not more true that ** God is all " than
that I am a person ; and if it is true that "God
is all," the fact must be interpreted in the light of
my personality. It is useless to assert that the
infinite cannot be measured by the finite, for
whatever truth the assertion may contain it re-
mains equally true that the reality of the infinite
cannot do away with the reality of the finite.
" In him all finite things find, not lose, their real-
ity. . . . All things in God does not mean
nothing but God." '

The only conception that I can form of God is
that he is a personality like myself. If he were
less a personality than myself, then I should be
greater than God. All that is essential to myself
I know is also essential to the divine Being. In
him reason, will, and love come to their perfec-
tion, and he must self-consciously possess these
elements of personality. It is on this very fact
that our faith in this universe reposes. It is a

1 Stttdies in HegeVs Phihiophy^ p. 23.

The Philosophy of Christian Science

trustworthy universe because such a God is its
ground. "If the term * person/ as distinguished
from * thing/ is taken as the one term which es-
pecially signalizes moral relation among beings,
and which implies moral order, as distinguished
from merely mechanical or physical order ; and
if the universe of reality, in its moral principle,
must be treated as an object of moral trust, when
we live in obedience to its conditions, does not
this mean that it is virtually personal, or revela-
tion of a person rather than a thing — an infinite
person, not an infinite thing? If our deepest re-
lation to it must be ethical trust in perfect wisdom
and goodness or love at the heart of it — trust in
its harmonious adaptations to all who are willing
to be physically and morally adapted to it — this
is just to say that our deepest or final relation to
reality is ethical rather than physical ; that per-
sonality instead of thingness is the highest form
under which man at any rate can conceive of God.
This is the moral personification, or finally theistic
conception, of the universe of experience." *

In order to satisfy the mind's demand for per-
sonality at the base of the universe it is not nec-
essary that we should suppose that God draws
conclusions from premises as we do, nor that he
should exercise the power of memory. This
would be anthropomorphism to the extent of mak-

* Fraser, Philosophy of Themiiy vol ii, p. 149.

Christian Science and its Problems

ing God a man. The conception of God as an
old man sitting at his desk in the skies, and scan-
ning human actions and the general on-going of
the world, or as a king in his far-off palace with
his court assembled about him, is repulsive to
Christian thought. The personality of God in no
way carries with it such a conception. But the
definite thought of personality came as a growth,
and from a most rudimentary beginning proceeded
stage by stage with the progress of the race until
it became one of the most sublime cognitions of
the human mind.

Here, then, are two personalities separate and
distinct, God and myself. This is knowledge. It
avails not to say with Mrs. Eddy that the " soul
is God " and " God is soul ; " " There are no
souls." Whoever makes such an assertion must
face the fact that everyone knows himself to be a
person.

But if it is true that I am a peraonality distinct
from God, can I antagonize God in my personal-
ity ? Mrs. Eddy asserts that I cannot, else God
would be the creator of evil Logic, by the way,
avails little against the facts of consciousness, and
no fact of consciousness is more universally at-
tested than the power of self to resist God. The
force of this fact Mrs. Eddy attempts to evade in
her doctrine of the mortal mind, "nothing claim-
ing to be something," itself a nonentity imagining

The Philosophy of Christian Science

error to be real, "belief that life, substance, and
intelligence are in and of matter." She would
make it appear that such antagonism is not in
the real self, but in a kind of fictitious appendage
of the real self. This, however, is not the fact of
consciousness. No fact is more profound in the
mind than that the real antagonism to God is in
the heart of selfhood. It resides not in thought
or action, but in wilL

How does this fact of sin make God the author
of evil ? That God cannot_creaie_e3dLia.aLf unda-^^
mental axiom with Mrs. Eddy. But cannot he
create the conditions that make evil possible?
Was man necessitated by his creation to be God-
like? If so, how came the mortal mind? The
answer is, through the falL But if the mortal
mind came through the fall, why not real antag-
onism to God? It is interesting to note that
while Mrs. Eddy smuggles in the fact of the fall,
she gives no rational account of it Mortal error
was somehow supposed to exist apart from man,
who was the reflection of his Maker, and by some
subtle power insinuated itself into human life.
Then we find the divine reflection obscured by
mortal mind. How came this marvelous change ?
It will be observed in Mra Eddy's teaching that
there is no place for free wilL The original man
had no power to change himself any more than

the reflection of a man*s face in a mirror can

Christian Science and its Problems

cliange itself. Grod did not create mortal mind ;
how, then, did it come to becloud the image in
the mirror ?

We cannot ignore the power of free will God
did create man a free, self-determining personal-
ity, in whom was lodged the possibility of a war-
fare between the lower and the higher life, an
antagonism to God. The only life consistent with
man's existence is one of harmonious ethical re-
lation to God.

The Philosophy of Christian Science

IV. Fundamental Principles.

Science and Health is a tissue of incoherent
speculations, tied together, if we may allow so
much, by the following propositions :

♦*1. God is All.

**2. God is Good. Good is Mind.

** 3. God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter.

'^4. Life, God, omnipotent Good, deny death, evil,
sin, disease.

** Disease, sin, evil, death, deny Good, omnipotent
God, Life."

The book itself is supposed to be a defense and
exposition of these fundamental propositions, but
it is an iteration and reiteration of them, the ob-
ject of which is to prepare the way for mental
healing. Disease is supposed by the mortal mind
to reside in matter, which must therefore be shown
to be nothing. God is now all that remains, and
as God cannot be diseased, there can, therefore,
be no diseasa The first in the series is radical to
the system : " God is All." But we have shown
that God is not all in any sense that would
exclude the personality of man. Disharmony
with God is a fact of human consciousness, and
from disharmony come evil, disease, and death.

Mrs. Eddy seems to labor ainder confusion of
thought concerning matter. First, she misrepre-
sents the view of matter taken by scienca For

Christian Science and its Problems

example : " Matter is sentient " (p. 180). " Mor-
tal belief, misnamed man, says matter has intelli-
gence and sensation " (p. 180). " That matter is
substantial, or has life and sensation, is one of the
false beliefs of mortals " (p. 174). ** Mind, not
matter, is the Creator " (p. 152). Thus she charges
that those who believe in the objective reality of
matter claim that matter is sentient, intelligent,
living, and a creative power. It is impossible to ;
apologize for such misrepresentations. Secondly,
she assumes that it is currently believed that mat-
ter is antagonistic to God, the very seat of evil.
On the contrary, both philosophical and theolog-
ical thinkers regard matter as good, not opposed
to God, the ground of the divine self -manifesta-
tion.

The denial of matter carries with it the most
preposterous conclusions. Thus she remarks :
"We say the body suffers from the effects of
cold, heat, fatigue, etc., but this is belief and
error, and not the truth of being, for matter can-
not suffer; mortal mind alone suffers, and not
because a law of matter has been trespassed, but
a law of mind." Cold can have no effect, there-
fore it is not necessary to dress warmly and to
have fires in winter. You may thrust your hand
in the fire with impunity. Poison may be eaten
like sugar; sanitation and hygiene are of no

avail; dirt on the skin is matter in the mortal

The Philosophy of Christian Science

eye ; and much more of the same sort if matter is
nothing. It is a very common resort for teachers
of this class, when the absurdity of such teaching
is exposed, to claim that it is aij esoteric gnosis.
"Can you understand this?" she says to Eev.
Stacy Fowler. " No ; and no one can fully until
I educate the spiritual sense to perceive the syb-
stance of spirit and the substanceless of matter."
Thus the " common to all " is not real, only the
"special to ma"

A specimen of her logic may be found on page
7, where she says, " There is no pain in truth and
no truth in pain." This proposition is intended
to affirm that there is no reality in pain because
there is no pain in truth. Let it be noticed that '
the terms of this inversion are not univocal. As
soon as we give truth the same meaning in both
members of the inversion the fallacy appears in
the light of all experience. Distribute the term
truth as in the foUovdng proposition : Some truth
is very painful. Eemorse can hardly be described
as a delusion, and the mind that knows remorse
knows pain.

Thus a tissue of assertions constitutes the but-
tress of her fundamental principles, and from
them to conclude that "God is all," and that
therefore death, evil, sin, disease are unrealities,
is to require a dangerous stretch of reason, and to
mistake quicksand for "principles" upon which

she builds an ambitious and revolutionary system.

Christian Science and its Problems

V. Science.

Kepler, when he read the laws of the heavens,
exclaimed, " I think thy thoughts after thee."
This is the delightful service of all science — it in-
terprets the intelligence in nature. There is a
certain affinity between man and his surround-
ings, and the ground of that affinity is intelli-
genca Eeason in nature invites man to the work
of interpretation. Science is the response of reason
to reason. Man can no more suppress the scien-
tific faculty than he can suppress the activity of
his mind. His first questions are addressed to
nature, and it is nature's secrets that he is ever
trying to unravel. Science is not a scheme of
the human mind imposed on nature; it is the
discovery and elucidation of what is already in
nature.

It is therefore fundamental to science that it
should deal with facts — ^that is, with individual
actualities or realities as an atom, or a force, or a
law of nature. The fact must be such as can be
verified through the channels of observation, and
the vei'ification of the fact is of vital importance
to science. But facts should never be considered
individually exclusive of their relationa " The
world is not a collection of individual facts exist-
ing side by side and capable of being known

separately. A fact is nothine; except in its rela-

The Philosophy of Christian Science

tions to other facts ; and as these relations are
multiplied in the progress of knowledge, the na-
ture of the so-called fact is indefinitely modified."
It is the work of science to trace out these rela-
tions, and not only to discern clearly and com-
pletely the discrete fact, but also to define its
connections . and discriminate the system of
which it is a part. Science is thus a legitimate
process of analysis and synthesis.

Let us take an example of a fact : Food will
nourish the human body. This is a fact Let
the doubter try to live without food. In nourish-
ing the human body certain particles of food are
carried to the bones, other particles to the tissues
and nerves. How do we know this ? Because
we find that the constituents of the body are con-
tained in the food ; the involution must be equal
to the evolution. Christian Science is powerless
to change this fact. If a child's teeth do not
form normally, the addition of phosphates to its
food will hasten the process of dentition. This is
a very familiar fact An acid is a fact, so also is
an alkali ; it is also a fact that they will combine
with a neutral result The theory .that ." matter j'
is nothing " cannot annihilate thes e fac ts. Car-j
bon and oxygen are facts; it is also a fact that
they combine in the production of heat The
Christian Scientist never builds a fire by putting

coals in the grate and then excluding the air. It

Christian Science and its Problems

is a fact that the nutrition of the system depends
on the circulation of the blood, by which the par-
ticles of food are carried to their appropriate des-
tination. It is a fact that the circulation of the
blood depends largely upon the contractile power
of the heart. Facts like these find a true classifi-
cation in a system of physiology and hygiene.

There is an evident value of knowledge thus
classified. From chemistry we learn that car-
bonic acid gas will extinguish fire. Hence the
chemical fire extinguisher. From the science of
electricity we have learned to light our streets
and propel our cars. The science of pneumatics
has given us the locomotiva Optics and chem-
istry have given us photography ; indeed, modem
civilization is the gift of scienca

Science, however, has passed through a slow
and laborious growth. Its origin may be traced
to man*s first reflection on the phenomena of na-
ture. The Babylonian priest, in his silent watch-
tower, aided only by the natural eye, laid the
foundation of astronomical scienca The Egyp-
tian also knew something of astronomy, and
much of geometry, and made considerable prog-
ress with chemistry and metallurgy. Physics,
chemistry, and physiology were studied by the
Greeks, and everywhere in the ancient world the
feeling was awakened that the study of nature

must ultimate in the mastery of nature. The

The Philosophy of Christian Science

noblest minds that have graced the human race
have partaken of this feeling. Aristotle, Hippo-
crates, Paracelsus, Galileo, Bruno, Kepler, New-
ton, Faraday, and Helmholtz have struggled with
the mysteries of nature, and have sought to make
science conform to a system of true and certain
knowledge.

Shall all this splendid product of the noblest
minds be put aside as of no worth — as " a false
belief of mortal mind? " If not, why not? Be-
cause it deals with and rationalizes facts that
underlie all life. To dispense with science is to
dispense with rationality.

If science is true — chemistry, astronomy, bot-
any, for instance ' — then the sciences of anatomy
and physiology must likewise be true, because
they rest on observed and classified facts. If
anatomy and physiology, why not pathology?
Are not the facts of abnormality as patent as
those of normality? Is not a cataract on the eye
as much a fact as the crystalline lens? Is not a
lesion of the valves of the heart as much a fact
as the heart itself? If these are facts, why may
they not be studied and classified ?

What is the difference between the mind that
discovers and classifies pathological facts and the
mind that attends to the facts of chemistry and
astronomy? The same mental faculties are

* Sciefice afid Healthy p. 82.
61

Christian Science and its Problems

brought into operation in discovering and classi-
fying the facts of pathology as in dealing with
the facts of chemistry. Why should one be the
product of mortal mind more than the other?

This is the justification of medical science.
Like all science, it should not be estimated by its
results, but by its methods. Medical science aims
at the interpretation of nature. It deals with a
certain class of natural facts which solicit investi-
gation just as much as the facts that are included
in geological science. If medical science is put
without the pale of legitimacy, so must all science
submit to the same exclusion. Such a course is
an act of self-stultification, which is impossible
to the normal mind. It may be true that medi-
cal science limits its sphere far within its true
bounds ; there may be facts belonging to it that
are left unconsidered ; but this in no way dis-
qualifies it as a truly rational procedure to the ex-
tent that it carries research. It might have pro-
founder comprehension of its facts were its field
enlarged, but its methods must be accredited
whatever its defects.

Christian Science, on the other hand, denies

facts. It refuses to clearly determine facts or to

classify them, hence it rejects the methods as

well as the conclusions of science. In so doing it

abandons rationality and seeks to destroy the

foundations of civilized life. The fantastic im-

The Philosophy of Christian Science

aginations which it calls knowledge are brought
forward as a substitute for the scientific conclu- y
sions of the human intellect, and this the world
is informed is Christian Scienca The wonder is
that Christianity has been able to endure the rep-
etition of such caricatures from age to aga

Christian Science and its Problems

VL Evil.

"Evil," says Principal Fairbaim, "is a philo-
sophical term, and denotes every condition, cir-
cumstance, or act that in any manner or degree
interferes with complete perfection or happiness
of being, whether physical, metaphysical, or mor-
al" * Christian Science defines evil as unreality
— that is, the opposite of divine order. Let-its
inquire how far this is a correct representation.

We will begin with physical evil. Opening
the Bible at Isa. xlv, 7, we read, " I form the
light, and create darkness; I make peace, and
create evil ; I am the Lord, that doeth all these
things." If this is a protest against Persian dual-
ism, it explicitly affirms that God creates physical
eviL If, on the other hand, it means that " peace "
is that happy state to which Israel should be re-
stored, and " evil" is the exile, the affirmation is
not changed because the exile was physical evil. '
How far, then, do we find the declaration of
the prophets, that God is the cause of physical
evil, verified by historical fact ? Science teaches
us that the first men endured privation and suf-
fered from exposura They existed in the midst
of gigantic and ruthless forces. The forests were

' Pliice of Christ in Modem Tkeohgy^ p. 452.

' See also Isa. liv, 16 ; Amos iii, 6 ; Lam. iii, 38.

The Philosophy of Christian Science

swept by storms of relentless fury, beasts of im-
mense size and ferocity roamed in countless num-
bers through the trackless wilds, and food was
secured only by great effort For protection from
the storms the caves were their first dwelling-
placa The very fact that they lived in caves
proves that they felt the pain and misery of ex-
posure. Their muscular strength was no match
for their brute enemies. Means of warfare had to
be invented. The rude weapons of those early
men may still be found in the river diift, the re-
mains of a race that existed many thousands of
years before the beginning of history. Deep
buried in the calcareous floors of great caverns
have been discovered the instruments of warfare
which those wild tribes employed in the terrific
struggle that consumed so much of their life.
" They had bows and arrows, daggers of reindeer
horn, spears tipped with flint or bone, and har-
poons. Besides they made a formidable club of
the lower jawbone of the cave bear, with its
canine tooth still left in its place." Bather a for-
midable array of weapons for a people who knew
nothing of pain. Sometimes, in war with other
tribes, they fell into the hands of their enemies
and became a toothsome morsel for cannibals.
Sometimes they fell prey to the hyena, the mark
of whose savage teeth is still left on their bones.
Whoever invented the formula, "There is no

(5) 66

Christian Science and its Problems

truth m pain," it certainly was not one of these
primeval men.

As man's nature grew more complex methods
had to be devised to satisfy his increasing wants.
In his primitive state his clothing consisted of
skins, his house was a rock shelter, his weapons
were flint, and food was the great end of his life.
But his intellect, was quickened by the very
struggle for existence. He came to prize what-
ever reinforced his powers, and the acquisition of
this reinforcement was a matter of great impor-
tance. This was shown especially in the growth
of social relations and the founding of civil order.
Here appeared especially the advantage of knowl-
edge. Ignorance came to be recognized as a
hindrance, hedging the way of man in the attain-
ment of "complete perfection or happiness of
being," and so far ignorance was an evil, and al-
ways has been an evil.

Mrs. Eddy says that "life, God, omnipotent
Good" denies evil; and that evil denies "life,
God, omnipotent Good." That is, if there is evil,
there is no God ; and if God is, there is no evil.
The denial of evil in the light of the facts we
^have just considered is absurd. Is there, there-
fore, no God ? Is not this formula a vapid asser-
tion, empty of both sense and logic? She has a
penchant for conveying conclusions not contained

in the premises. Thus she says, " If pain is as

The Philosophy of Christian Science

real as the absence of pain, both must be im-
mortal" She leaves the reader to draw the con-
clusion that pain cannot be immortal, therefore
pain is not real. But who can prove that pain is
not immortal? The refinement of our nature
makes pain more delicate, not less real. Again,
she says, " There is no pain in truth and no truth
in pain." With the first term of this inversion
she is not concenied ; her purpose is to assert that
there is no reality in pain. If she means by real
something " actually existing, not fictitious, im-
aginary," then her statement is erroneous, as we
have seen. But she boldly denies the possibility
of sentiency. " Nerves do not feeL" Let Mrs.
Eddy remember that we do not know dead mat-
ter. All that we know of feeling is in connection
with the nerves. If you put your finger in the
fire, she says, you should not feel pain. " Holy
inspiration has created states of mind which are
able to nullify the action of the flames " (p. 54).
Nerves, in her scheme, seem to have no power to
convey sensations. How is it, then, that we asso-
ciate sweetness with sugar? Is sugar on the
tongue as neutral as chalk ? Why is it that we
pass our hand over a surface and say whether it
is smooth or rough ? If nerves are sensationless, let
Mrs. Eddy explain how we have arrived at the
attributes of objects around us. We do not live

in a neutral, colorless world. It is full of variety

Christian Science and its Problems

and beauty of form and color and quality, and
the nerves of the body are the points of the mind's
contact with the external world. To deny this is
to deny the reality of all human knowledge ; to
admit it is to concede that we are sentient beings,
and hence that we can feel pain. i

** There is no pain in trutii." As a matter of
fact the most exquisite pain is in truth. A con-
sciousness of sin is real and painful. The exi-
gencies of Mra. Eddy's scheme lead her practi-
cally to deny the reality of moral evil. She re-
minds us of Spinoza, who also denied evil, as
he held that all was necessitated, and therefore
nothing could exist which ought not to exist
Hence he also denied free will, a denial implicit
in the teachings of Mrs. Eddy. It is a doctrine
of which she makes no use ; indeed, after deny-
ing personality there is no room left for it If I '
am a person, constructing my own character, de-
termining my own end in life, then I have free
will. If I have no free will, I am not a person.
But the consciousness of free will and responsi-
bility in man is profound. We have the power
of choice, which we constantly exercise. When
a man chooses he also rejects. When good is his
choice he rejects the opposite of good, which is
evil. In the exercise of such a choice there at- '
tends the sense of moral responsibility. If there

were nothing but good to be chosen, there could

The Philosophy of Christian Science

be no such sense of responsibility. If evil were »
only an unreality and delusion, the profound
sense of responsibility in choice would vanish. .
But this sense of responsibility is indestructible
and universal, and as such witnesses to the reality
of moral evil.

Mrs. Eddy says evil denies God — that is, evil >
is so incompatible with the nature of God that to \
admit the fact of evil is to deny the reality of
God — and let it be remembered that this is physi- /
cal, not moral, evil of which she speaks. Disease
and pain are the chief forms of evil known to her
book.

May not the contrary of her proposition be
true ? Physical evil is a fact, as we have seen,
and God is a reality in some sense compatible
with that fact The solution of the problem may
be beyond the power of the human mind, just as
all facts of life retreat out of the finite into the
infinite ; but they begin in the finite, and so far
what is known of them is real knowledge If we
assume that we are a part of a cosmical system of
organic adaptations, in which " everthing is fitted
into everything else," the assumption is sup-
ported by both observation and experience.
Means and ends are recognized everywhere in
natura Science is full of the language of teleol-
ogy, or purpose with reference to a definite end,

and the adaptations in nature seem to culminate

Christian Science and its Problems

in man. The whole system is adapted to man,
and man is adapted to the whole. We have,
therefore, an unwavering faith in the power that
underlies the system and adaptations of nature.
It is a power that makes for righteousness ; it is
purposive of perfection. Take away this faith,
and pessimism alone remains. It is a faith un-
diminished by evil ; that endures through the
darkest night of human experience, because it
knows that the ways of God are inscrutable.
" Clouds and darkness are round about him, but
righteousness and judgment are the establish-
ment of his throne."

There must, therefore, be an end that pain is
intended to serve, and moralists are doubtless
right in regarding pain as well as pleasure as an
incentive to right action — that is, pleasure is an
incentive to the pursuit of the right, and pain
/ of aversion to wrong. Thus the latter plays an
important part in the attainment of man's ideal.
Hence we see how important the consciousness
of pain. Any system that would deprive man
of this consciousness would so far thwart his
moral development.

It is an error to treat pain as a delusion. We
must recognize its profound uses in the economy
of life. Has it not offered the "highest possi-
bilities and most fruitful occasions of character? "

Has not fortitude, a most sturdy virtue, grown

The Philosophy of Christian Science

under its discipline? And has not pain often
afforded the strongest evidence of love, as when
a strong man perils his life for his family, or a
patriot is shot to pieces in defense of liberty ?
The chief end of life is not to escape from pain,
for in so doing we may miss the highest good.
To make it contribute to manhood is to subdue
pain. To the reflection from the neighboring
snow fields Davos and St Moritz owe largely
their high winter temperature, and thus often
the most forbidding things in life bring us the
opposite of what they threaten. So it is with pain.
It lays ruthless hands upon the structure of the
body ; it rends into tiitters the veil of life, but
this is the very process by which life acquires its
fruitage; and "what matters it if the blossoms
are swept away by the wind and rain, so the fruit

is set?"*

Again, sympathy, so vital in the evolution of
a worthy life, begins at pain. Even animals will
rush to one of their kind moaning in distress,
and it is this instinct that rises into Christian
charity, into love that cherishes, and sacrifices

* Christian Science rules Paul out when he makes such state-
ments as the following: "Ye know that it was by reason of
physical infirmity that I preached the gospel unto you on the
first of my two visits ; and the facts of my bodily constitution
which were trying to you were not despise ' •'or rejected by you,
but ye received me as a messenger of viod." Gal. iv, 18, 14

(see Greek text). See also 2 Cor. i, 8.

Christian Science and its Problems

for those that suffer. It was the pains of the
world that took hold of Christ When he healed
the lad at the Mount of Transfiguration he did
not stand aloof from him, but he took him by
the hand, he came very near and entered into
sympathy with him. Thus he grasps every hand
of distress and pain, and presents the great ex-
ample of sacrifice. To all men, as to him, " pain
is the possibility of all that lies in sacrifice, be-
cause it is the possibility of disinterested sympa-
thy, and so of all self-sacrifica" Hence sympathy
is the bond of all vital union among men ; as the
best natures always have the most of it, so, as
Coleridge says, " By sympathy all powerful souls
have kindred with each other." What should
we miss more in life than sympathy? _We
spare the labors of men ; we may losk^sition,
influence, wealth, and even health, and yeTlive
on in comfort if with resignation ; but life would
not be worth living without human sympathy.
Thus pain, without which there could be no sym-
pathy, is a minister of God.

Neither pain nor death deny God ; both afiirm
him. Death, which nature uses in the service of
life, is a mighty angel of God. Without it the
earth would soon be overpeopled and life de-
prived of its latitude. It keeps open the field
for life ; it moves one generation off while an-
other enters on the theater of time. It avoids

The Philosophy of Christian Science

the disadvantages of universal senility, for not
even Christian Science can prevent us growing old.
It clears the way for every discovery of truth,
makes progress possible, and makes impossible
the immortality of bigotry. It brings a sudden
end to despotism and tyranny, and to the pro-
moters of moral evil, while it gives a fresh
chance to the growth of virtue and goodness
with every generation. The fear of death must
depart from the Christ-conquered heart, because
it has no realm of its own, no sinister purposes,
no message but love. It is true "that life ia
ever lord of death," and hence it is a vile cal^
umny that charges death with denying God.

Amiel says : " To curse grief is easier than to
bless it, but to do so is to fall back into the point
of view of the earthly, the carnal, the natural
man. By what has Christianity subdued the
world if not by the apotheosis of grief, by its
marvelous transmutation of suffering into tri-
umph, of the crown of thorns into the crown of
glory, and of a gibbet into a symbol of salvation ?
What does the apotheosis of the cross mean if
not the death of death, the defeat of sin, the
beatification of martyrdom, the raising to the
skies of voluntary sacrifice, the defiance of pain ?
* death, where is thy sting? grave, where
is thy victory ? ' By long brooding over this

theme — ^the agony of the just, peace in the midst

Christian Science and its Problems

of agony, and the heavenly beauty of such peace
— humanity came to understand that a new re-
ligion was bom, a new mode, that is to say, of
explaining life and of understanding suflEering.

" Suffering was a curse from which man fled ;
now it becomes a purification of the soul, a sa-
cred trial sent by eternal Love, a divine dispen-
sation meant to sanctify and ennoble us, an
acceptable aid to faith, a strange initiation into
happiness. O power of belief ! All remains the
same, and yet all is changed. A new certitude
arises to deny the apparent and the tangible ; it
pierces through the mystery of things ; it places
an invisible Father behind visible nature; it
shows us joy shining through tears, and makes

of pain the beginning of joy."

The Philosophy of Christian Science

VII. Proof Texts.

It is not surprising that Mrs. Eddy attempts to
put the seal of divine approval upon her philoso-
phy by quotations from the Scriptures. In her
enthusiasm for a new " discovery " she does what
hundreds of others have done in like circum-
stances — she reads it all into the Bible. Her
method of interpretation beara some resemblance
to that of Origen and Swedenborg. She does not
interpret Scripture regardless of any principles,
but those that she adopts are unsound. Before
we consider her exegesis let us attend to what con-
stitutes sound principles of Biblical Interpreta-
tion.

Principles of Biblical Interpretation upon which
all can agree are very desirable. There can be
no unity of Christian thought if each one is al-
lowed to interpret according to his fancy. Nor
is there any reason why the Bible is an exception
to all other literature in this respect Interpreta-
tion of literature in general gives us the princi-
ples and laws of Biblical Interpretation. This is
a maxim which has been regarded as incontrover-
tible by all the great authorities since Ernesti.
From whence did these principles spring ? Are
they artificial productions imposed on Scripture
by extensive learning ? Have they grown out of
a love for subtleties and nice distinctions? Are

Christian Science and its Problems

they sparks of genius? Far from being this,
they are not the invention of man, scarcely a dis-
covery of his. " They are coeval with our na-
ture. Ever since man was created and endowed
with the powers of speech and made a communi-
cative, social being he has had occasion to practice
upon the principles of interpretation, and has
done so.'* * To understand human speech one
must be an interpreter, and upon the exercise of
the commonly accepted principles of interpreta-
tion all social and business intercourse depends.
Without these principles we would cease to be
rational beings in an orderly world. If men in-
terpreted the language of business as arbitrarily
as they often interpret the Bible, there could be
no financial stability.

Hence in Biblical Interpretation we must con-
sider the meaning of words, the construction of
sentences, the environment of the writer, the un-
expressed relations of thought in the mind of the
writer, and parallel passages. But we must fur-
ther constantly bear in mind that the Bible is a
product of double authorship — the divine and
human. The unique fact of the divine author-
ship, however, does not change the principle that
the words must be interpreted as used in human
speech.

Heilce there is no justification for what is 1

* Professor Moses Stuart.
76

The Philosophy of Christian Science

'■ known as the double sense of Scriptura Typi-
cal meaning in a passage does not give it double
sense, nor is such an interpretation to be derived
from predictive phophecy. The Scripture never
claims a double sense for itself ; and if we may
impose a double sense, why not a threefold or a
fourfold sense ?

Some of the early interpreters, indeed, said
that, as there were four rivers in paradise, there
should be four streams of truth or teaching flow-
ing out of the Bible. With a double sense the
book would become merely a collection of riddles.
When men want to make riddles they give a
double sense to language ; but the Bible is not a
collection of conundrums ; it is a book that the
uneducated may read intelligently, so that we
may find in the Christian world a common sense
of Scriptura

I What is called " exegesis " in Mrs. Eddy's book
is at best only an attempt to fortify her system
by the quotation of sundry texts utterly foreign

f to the thought Each of these texts she foUowtf^
with a reiteration of her ideas, which is made to
have the appearance of interpretation.

Thus, take the first verse of Genesis : " In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
In the light of all rules of Biblical Interpretation
this is a plain statement that God created the

known world. Mrs. Eddy cannot resist the

Christian Science and its Problems

temptation to make a riddle of it The passage,
she says, affirms the eternal verity and unity of
God and man, including the universe. God
means the creative principle — life, truth, and
love. The universe is God*s reflection. " The
I creation consists of the unfolding' of spiritual
ideas and their identities, which are embraced in
the infinite mind and forever reflected."

Mrs. Eddy says that the word Elohim (trans-
lated God in this passage) means "life, truth,
love." Here again she is in error. It means the
" Being who is feared." " Love casteth out fear,"
hence Elohim did not denote love to the Hebrew
mind. Further, how does the passage affirm
the " unity of God and man, including the uni-
verse? " and where does it contain any warrant
for the pantheistic method of creation which she
reads into it ? It is the old fallacy of the double
sense — Bible riddle-making.

As we proceed more and more we are involved
in the spiritualizing of plain Scripture. Thus,
Gen. i, 6, " And God said. Let there be a firma-
ment in the midst of the waters, and let it divide
the waters from the waters. " What does " water "
mean? What does ** firmament" mean? Let
our expositor inform us: Firmament has a
spiritual significance and means "understand-
ing." She leaves us to infer that truth is the
water above the firmament, and error is the water

The Philosophy of Christian Science

under it (p. 499). " God called the firmament
heaven," says the writer of Genesis. Mrs. Eddy
says that these words mean that "spirit unites
understanding to eternal harmony through divine
science." Why not? It certainly is as easy to
say this as to say a great many other things in
her book.

But Mrs. Eddy waxes bold as she proceeds
with her exegesis of Genesis. When she comes
to the seventh verse of the second chapter she
confronts a passage that requires even a fourfold
sense to take the " matter " out of it " And the
Lord God (Jehovah) formed man of the dust of
the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the
breath of life; and man became a living soul.''
The phrase " dust of the ground "has an ominous
sound to the Christian Scientist "How can a
material organization become the basis of man ?
How can the nonintelligent become the medium
of mind? " she exclaims, impatiently. " Is it the
truth ? or is it a lie concerning man and God ?
It must be the latter," she concludes (p. 517).

Gen. iii, 16 is handled very cautiously. " Unto

the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy

sorrow and thy conception ; in sorrow shalt thou

bring forth children ; and thy desire shall be to

thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." This,

says our exegete, unveils the results of sin, as

shown in sickness and death. But let the reader

Christian Science and its Problems

observe that the immediate cause of these results
was God. " I will greatly multiply thy sorrow."
God is thus represented as the cause of sorrow,
\/pain, evil. How, then, does evil deny God ? The
fourth proposition on page 7 of Science and Health
cannot be defended in the light of this text'

We are anticipating presently to be introduced
to the origin of mortal mind, and we are brought
to it in the comment on Gen. iii, 22-24 Here it
is conceded that it had a definite beginning. The
first chapter of Genesis, she says, represents crea-
tion " as spiritual, entire, and good." Here " evil
has no local habitation or name ; " but the second
chapter " is to depict the falsity of en-or and its
effects." But how did this mortal mind arise ?
If God is good, and God is all, if man when he
came from the hands of his Creator was a pure
reflection of God, if " will-power is but an illusion
of belief " and " not a faculty of soul " (p. 486); if,
therefore, man has no power in himself to deter-
mine his own life, whence came mortal mind ?
What relation does God, who is all, and man, who
is a reflection of God, sustain to mortal mind,
which is " error creating other errors ? " This
question must be answered to save the air castle
of mortal mind.

It is unnecessary to follow further the spirit-
ualizing method of Mrs. Eddy's exegesis. Often

* See page 47.
80

The Philosophy of Christian Science

she brings passages together in such a relation as
to create a false impression. Thus she says that
Christ's imperative command to his disciples was
to "preach the gospel to every creature," " heal
the sick^^ (p. 343). Now, healing the sick was not
included in the great commission and was not
thus passed on as an authoritative command to
his Church. She says the firat Christian duty
Jesus taught his followers was "the healing
power of truth and love" (p. 336). If by this
she means that truth and love are healing to a
sin-sick soul, the statement is not new to Chris-
tians. If she means that the healing of physical
disease was the supreme Christian duty that Jesus
imposed on his followers, it is not true. The error
at this point is vital. The mission of Jesus to
the world was not primarily the healing of dis-
ease His work was spiritual. He came to touch
the springs of man's deepest life; to break the
chains of spiritual slavery ; to put hope in the
heart of the poor and desponding ; to open to the
blind a new and true view of life ; to usher in
the acceptable year of the Lord, the kingdom of
God in the human heart Physical refreshing is
an incident of this spiritual renewing. He came
to bring life to the soul of man. He addressed
the reason, the imagination, the will. He sought
to restore normal relations between man and God,

and thus to harmonize the world. He instituted
(6) 81

•'

Christian Science and its Problems

a spiritual movement that has progressively con-
tributed to human well-being in its entire range.
He was to the individual and thence to society
a divine uplifting power ; he was the concrete
expression of divine truth toward man ; he was
the ideal of life, and be became incarnate in hu-
manity, that in him humanity might become di-
vine, and that divinity might become human.*
But his mission was not to work miracles. He
sought to hush the report of his miracles ; he
would be known as a teacher come from God, a
planter of truth in the mind; a king who had
come to establish his kingdom — the realm of
truth, the kingdom of God in which the will of
God should be done in the whole of human
lifa

Too large a place is given to miracles in all
/that class of teaching to which Christian Science
belongs. The whole course of nature is miracu-
lous if the word means the manifestation of divine
power ; and we are most intimately joined to the
course of nature. Nature is not thus confined to
things that are material, but includes all estab-
lished order, whether it be in the region of sense
or of spirit It is not improbable that in view of
man's free agency, which has been used in the in-
terest of evil — the assertion of his personality
above scientific order — God may deviate from

* John Hi, lY ; xii, 47 ; xviii, 37 ; xvii, 21, 23.

The Philosophy of Christian Science

the course of nature in the interest of grace, but
as we cannot think of God acting without law,
miracles must still be natural — ^that is, dispensed
by the higher law of perfect reason acting with
regard to the most beneficent purposa Hence it
is nature that should be emphasized, and it is na- ^ n
ture we need, and less the supernatural, in order
to correctly conceive the Gospel and the king-
dom of God. In fact, it is the regular and not the
irregular course of nature that Christianity en-
courages. Thus it may ultimately be discovered
that many of the miracles of Jesus were wrought
under some psychic law unknown to his time,
some law, it is true, discoverable to human genius ;
but this does not prove that he exercised only " the
natural endowments of a remarkable man who
was before his time in the healing art" On the
other hand, it would show that the methods of na-
ture are divinely approved, just as they are ap-
proved in our moral education in the experience
of our common life. Science shows many things
belonging to the established order of nature to-
day that yesterday were regarded as miraculous.
That Jesus conformed to nature does not deprive
him of the glory of his works. Is nature less the
manifestation of the immanent God because it is
orderly ? Hence we cannot believe that God will
stop the wheels of nature, violate its laws, and

make some startling display of power just to

Christian Science and its Problems

please the freak of some dyspeptic or to answer
the prayers of some erratic mind.

The glory of the Son of God was manifested in
his mighty works — that is, he thus showed him-
self intimately allied with God, and thus worthy
of attention as the divine teacher.* The recogni-
tion of these works as natural in no way detracts
from his mission to reveal the Father. " We can,
therefore, afford to regard the attempt," says Pro-
fessor Bruce, "to reduce the miracles of healing
to the level of the natural with considerable equa-
nimity. If that view were established, these
* miracles * would lose their value as signs an-
nexed to a doctrinal revelation — ^the function on
which the older apologists laid so much stress —
but they would retain and even in some respects
increase their value as a very important integral
part of revelation — as a revelation of the infinite
depths of compassion in the heart of the Son of
man.""

It should be remembered that the gospels con-
tain the record of only about thirty so-called
miracles, according to the usual interpretation,
and this number may no doubt be largely re-
duced. In current Jewish thought at the time
of Christ the symbolism of death was applied to
those who were " dead in sin." In the Targum

' John ii, 11 ; zi, 4 ; ix, 3.

* Miraadotu EUmeni in the Gospels^ p. t(4.

The Philosophy of Christian Science

blindness was applied to deficiency of spiritual
vision, lameness to spiritual inactivity. It was
said : " In the coming age the saints shall raise
the dead as Elias did. . . . What * dead ? ' * Pros-
elytes.'" The language of Jesus continues this
Jewish usage : "Let the dead bury their dead ; "
**The dead shall hear the voice of the Son of
God." Hence we naturally infer that when he
said to the twelve, "Raise the dead," he meant
" make proselytes." The process of translating
the Gospel from Eastern metaphor and poetry into
Greek prose might easily give rise to hypothesis
of miracles where no miracle was intended. That
we find in parallel passages one gospel saying
that Jesus " healed," while another says that he
"taught," suggests that the healing is a misun-
derstanding of a word intended to mean " spiritual
healing" or "teaching." Thus in Matt xiv, 14,
we read, " And he came forth, and saw a great
multitude, and he had compassion on them, and
healed their sick." The same incident is thus re-
ferred to in Mark vi, 34 : " And he came forth
and saw a great multitude, and he had compassion
on them, because they were as sheep not having a
shepherd: and he began to teach them many
things" (compare also Mark x, i, with Matt
xix, 2). In the parable of the sower, in quoting
Isa. vi, 9, 10, Matthew has, " Lest I should heal

them ; " Mark^ " Lest their sins should be for-

Christian Science and its Problems

given." In the charge to the disciples, which
Mrs. Eddy, without warrant, joins with the great
commission, Jesus says, "Heal the sick; freely
ye have received, freely giva" As they had
freely received spiritual life, so they were to im-
part it Evidently it was not literal disease that
they were sent to cure. Thus we may infer that
^hen great multitudes are spoken of as healed at
a time it was spiritual cure that was effected.*

The spiritual work of Jesus Christ, therefore,
demands primary attention. The healing miracles
were numerous enough to confirm his claims to
divinity, but not sufficiently numerous to over-
shadow his spiritual purpose. They show the
comprehensiveness of Christ's conception of sal-
vation. He was thus the pioneer of Christian
philanthropy and of every movement that aimed at
social amelioration. They show that the scope of
the kingdom of God covers all that relates to the
well-being of man, that temporal interests are to
be considered as well as eternal interests, that
social salvation is a part of the redemptive plan.
But while they teach us that Christ was not an
ultra spiritualist, there is no evidence that he came
to establish a dispensation of ** miraculous" heal-
ing of disease. That the apostles practiced the
healing of the sick in his name would be a con-
vincing apology for the Gospel in a time of stress

1 Edwin Abbott, in The New Wbrld^ September, 1896.

The Philosophy of Christian Science

and an emergent substitute for medical methods
which were then unknown. The apostle, how-
ever, gives us a great law that applies in physical
as well as spiritual sickness : " Work out your
own salvation, for it is he that worketh in you."
God works in us, but he does not override our
personality. " We are workers together with
God." By the exercise of our own minds we
must find the means of cure through which God
works in the overthrow of disease. The way of
life is divinely ordained. We must come back to
nature and by nature's laws ascend to spiritual

manhood and physical health.

IV
The Cures

The Cures

The Ctifcs

T f OW far back the belief in demoniacal posses-
J ^ sion extends it is difficult to say, but the
devil has long come in for a very large share of
the blame for our human sicknessea A few
years ago a natural cause of disease was as little
understood as a natural method of cure. Hence
the priestly class was early and long and in-
timately connected with the healing art, and for
centuries the practice of medicine was regarded
as unfriendly to religion. Even the canon law
of the Roman Church long declared the precepts
of medicine contrary to divine knowledge.
Relics came to be regarded as possessed of mar-
velous curative powers, and were so extensively
used that " enormous revenues flowed into vari-
ous monasteries and churches in all parts of
Europe." From this source a great demand
arose for amulets and charms, which was a rever-
sion to heathen fetichism. In 1471 Pope Paul
II expatiated to the Church on the efficacy of a
fetich, which consisted of a piece of wax from the
paschal candles, stamped with the figure of a
lamb and consecrated to the pope. This was
recommended to preserve men from fire, ship-
wreck, tempest, lightning, hail, as well as in assist-

Christian Science and its Problems

ing women in childbirth. Relics and fetiches now
became very common, and the scientific study of
medicine was discouraged.

The warfare offered by the Church authorities!
to the study of medicine was relentless and bitter. '
Supernatural means of cure were so abundant it
seemed irreligious to employ natural means.
Hence St Bernard declared that monks who took
medicine were guilty of conduct unbecoming re-
ligion. " Even the school of Salerno was held in
aversion by multitudes of strict churchmen, since
it prescribed rules for diet, thereby indicating a
belief that diseases arise from natural causes and
not from the malice of the devil."

The pursuit of anatomical studies, so necessary
to a scientific system of medicine, was long and
bitterly opposed. It was unlawful to meddle
with the bodies of the dead, an inheritance of
pagan civilizations, as, for example, in Egypt the
embalmer was regarded as accursed. Again, it
was insisted that mutilating the body might in-
jure its final resurrection ; and finally it was an-
nounced that the Church of Rome, which has
caused a greater spilling of innocent blood than
any other organization, " abhors the shedding of
blood." Thus the battle raged between science
and superstition. When at last medicines were
tolerated those only were allowed that bore the

divine sign or signature, as it was called. Hence

The Cures

it was held that " bloodroot, on account of its red
juice, was good for the blood ; liverwort, having
a leaf like the liver, cures diseases of the liver ;
eyebright, being marked with a spot like an eye,
cures diseases of the eye; celandine, having a
yellow juice, cures jaundice; bugloss, resembling
a snake's head, cures snake bite; red flannel,
looking like blood, cures blood tiiints, and there-
fore rheumatism ; bear's grease, being taken from
an animal thickly covered with hair, is recom-
mended to persons fearing baldness." In surgery
the Church also had its remedies : " The applica-
tion of various ordures relieved fractures ; the
touch of the hangman cured sprains ; the breath
of a donkey expelled poison ; friction with a dead
man's tooth cured toothacha" *

The cure of diseases by relics, charms, and su-
perstitious remedies was as remarkable as any
cures effected by Christian Science. The relics
of St Rosalia had for ages cured diseases and
warded off epidemics, and Professor Buckland's
discovery that they were the bones of a goat in
no way interfered with their magical powers.
Long was the sacred spring connected with the
Cathedral of Trondhjem, famed for its healing
efficacy, while angel voices, issuing from the ad-
jacent walls, cheered the sufferer to believe him-
self cured. The restoration of this cathedral has

* Warfare of Science with Theology^ voL ii, pp. 89, 40.

Christian Science and its Problems

uncovered the speaking tubes used by these
voices, which are now known to have been far
from angelic, but the cures were no less real. As
early as the eleventh century what was known as
the royal touch began to be practiced in England
under Edward the Confessor. This was supposed
to be peculiarly efficacious for epilepsy and scrof-
ula, the latter being consequently known as the
king's evil. There is overwhelming testimony
to the reality of these cures, the best authorities
being witnesses. Charles II touched nearly one
hundred thousand persons, and the outlay for
gold medals, issued to the afflicted on these oc-
casions, rose in some years as high as ten thou-
sand pounds. " John Brown, surgeon in ordinary
to his majesty and to St Thomas's Hospital, and
author of many learned works on surgery and
anatomy, published accounts of sixty cures due
to the touch of this monarch." '

Christian Science enjoys no solitary distinction
as a divine curative agency. The Roman Catholic
Church can point to innumerable cures effected
during the ages by relics and shrines. Lourdes is
in full operation to-day, with a host of witnesses
to its healing power. Stacks of crutches are left
annually at the shrine of St Anne de Beaupre,
in Canada. Relics are scattered all over the world,
with witnesses everywhere who have been healed.

> Warfare of Science^ vol. ii, p. 46.

The Cures

" Divine Healing," a system of Protestant faith
cure, has also its marvels to tell — men and
women cured of rheumatism, dyspepsia, spinal
diseases, typhoid fever, and numerous other mal-
adies. A church of this faith in Chicago issues
weekly a paper, called Leaves of Healing^ filled
with testimonies confirming the claims of the
leaders of the movement that it is the only
divinely approved way to recover lost health.
Spiritism also comes in for its share of healing
marvels. A tumbler of water is changed by
spirit agency into a tonic, an emetic, a cathartic,
or an anodyne, as the case requires. Again, the
witnesses and converts are numerous. Inde-
pendent administrators of supernatural curative
power travel about the country followed by long
trains of enthusiastic believers, the credentials
of their ministry. Thousands in Denver, relieved
from the thraldom of disease, lifted their voices
in praise of Francis Schlatter. He simply
touched the afflicted, or in some instances only a
handkerchief brought to him from the bedside of
the sick, and at once the poor sufferer began to
feel the thrill of returning health. The craze for
this barbarous treatment of disease is satisfied
with anything so that scientific medicine is kept
out of the case. A woman brings six reliable
witnesses into court to prove that a compound of

red earth and bull pups is a specific for " terri-

Christian Science and its Problems

ble ailments." A Negro woman in New York
works wonders with " grease taken from the tail
of a black cat that had died with its throat cut"
The more ignorant the worker, and the more^;
unreasonable the methods, the more satisfactory

J the results. Anything to get away from the use

: of our God-given intelligenca It is assumed that
the exercise of the human mind in the course of
man^s experience on earth has in no way increased
its knowledge or its capacity. If a primitive
man with his thick skull and coat of hair could
be raised from the dead, he would be the best
doctor of all. In lieu of him we have the faith
doctor in his chameleon forms.

Mrs. Eddy claims that the difference between
her system and all others is the difference be-
tween faith and understanding. Faith may
make a very good beginning in the healing art,
she says, but it should lead on to understanding,
which is Christian Science.* If by understand-
ing Mrs. Eddy means her philosophy, we have
seen that it is error. If she means that Christian

i' Science does not depend on faith in the treatment
of disease, her statement is misleading. The first

; and last thing she requires of the sick is faitL
There must first be perfect quiescenca Every
opposition of the mind must be hushed into
silenca She affirms that matter has no real exist-

* Science and Healthy p. 198.
96

The Cures

ence, that even the body is only a false belief of
mortal mind, and therefore no disease of the body
is possible. This principle of the system is care-
fully expounded to the patient He is expected
to acquiesce — that is, to have faith — though it be
against every deliverance of sense and reason. If
he protests, he is soothed into a passive state,
and urged to hold his mind in the attitude of de-
nying the possible existence of disease. For
half an hour the patient and the healer remain
silent and passive ; the patient's faith meanwhile
has grown stronger, and at the end of the seance
he is ready to affirm that he feels better. When
the patient comes to the healer with the affirma-
tion of his skepticism in the system he is informed
that Christian Science requires no faith; no difEer-
ence what he believes, he can be cured. Bright-
ening with hope, he submits to the treatment,
" full of the faith that he is to be healed without
faith." '

All systems of mental healing seem to come
under a common law, which may probably be
derived from the study of hypnotism. There is
resident in the mind a marvelous power over the
functions and sensations of the body. Since the
time of St Francis of Assisi numerous instances
of stigmatization are recorded in the lives of the
saints. Dr. Carpenter, in his Mental Physiol-

* Hudson, Law of Psychic Phenomena^ p. 160.
(7) 97

Christian Science and its Problems

ogy^ p. 689, gives a well-authenticated instance :
" The case of Louise Lateau has undergone a
scrutiny so careful on the part of medical men
determined to find out the deceit, if such could
exist, that there seems no adequate reason for
doubting its genuineness. This young Belgian
peasant had been the subject of an exhausting ill-
ness, from which she recovered rapidly after re-
ceiving the sacrament; a circumstance which
obviously made a strong impression on her mind-
Soon afterward blood began to issue every Friday
from a spot in her left side ; in the course of a few
months similar bleeding spots established them-
selves on the front and back of each hand and on
the upper surface of each foot, while a circle of
small spots formed on the forehead ; and the hem-
orrhage from these recurred every Friday, some-
times to a considerable amount About the same
time fits of * ecstasy ' began to recur, commenc-
ing every Friday, between eight and nine A. M.,
and ending about six p. M., interrupting her in
conversation, in prayer, or in manual occupation."
When she recovered she remembered distinctly
what had passed through her mind during the
"ecstasy." She had witnessed the passion, and
" minutely described the cross and the vestments,
the wounds, and the crown of thorns about the
head of the Saviour."

What the power of the mind is that produces

The Cures

! this remarkable phenomenon we do not know, but
1 it is claimed for hypnotism that it can be evoked
i under proper suggestion. Thus M. Bourru put a
patient into the somnambulistic condition and
gave him the following suggestion : " At four
o'clock this afternoon, after the hypnosis, you
will come into my office, sit down in the arm-
chair, cross your arms upon your breast, and
your nose will begin to bleed. At the hour ap-
pointed the young man did as directed. Several
drops of blood came from the left nostril"

"On another occasion the same investigator
traced the patient's name on both his forearms
with the dull point of an instrument Then
when the patient was in the somnambulistic con-
dition he said: * At four o'clock this afternoon
you will go to sleep, and your name will appear
written on your arms in letters of blood.' He
was watched at four o'clock, and seen to fall
asleep. On the left arm the lettei-s stood out in
bright-red relief, and in several places there were
drops of blood."

" Dr. Mabille, director of the insane asylum
at Laford, near Rochelle, a former pupil of Bern-
hiem, of excellent standing, repeated the experi-
ment made upon this subject after he was
removed to the asylum, and confirmed it He
obtained instant hemorrhage over a determined

region of the body. He also induced an attack

Christian Science and its Problems

of spontaneous somnambulism, in which the pa-
tient, doubting his personality, so to speak, sug-
gested to himself the hemorrhagic stigmata on
the arm, thus repeating the marvelous phenomena
of the famous stigmatized autosuggestionist,
Louise Lateau."*

These cases show the susceptibility of the
mind to suggestion, and the control it exercises,
when in a hypnotic state, over the organic func-
tions ; a conclusion arrived at by Bemheim and
other students of the subject This profound
mental power is now being turned by physicians
to therapeutic purposes. Neurasthenia, neural-
gia, rheumatism, insomnia, traumatic spine, mor-
phia-mania, and other drug habits readily yield
to this treatment Dr. Cocke mentions a case of^
spinal irritation caused by a railroad accident
He says : " The patient was hypnotized in ten
minutes. Suggestions were made to him while
in that condition that his spine would no longer
be sore. He was told that he could walk well
At the same time I told him that I would give
him a piece of metal that was magnetized, and
that every time he felt the symptoms of disease
during the day he would receive a strong elec-
tric shock from the metal.

" I took an aluminium pocket-piece from my
pocket which was sent to me as an advertise-

1 Bernheim, Siiffgestive Therapeutics^ pp. 86, 87.

100

The Cures

ment from some firm, and puncliing some holes
through it with my knife, bound it on the side
of his shirt next his skin. I suggested that,
when he was awaking from the hypnotic state,
he would go immediately down stairs and get
me a glass of water, and would not use his
crutches. He had not taken a step without
them for five yeara I then commanded him to
wake up. He did so, began to move around
restlessly, complained of the heat, and said,
* Would you like a glass of water? * Eeceiving
an affirmative answer, he rose and went down stairs
without the crutches, to the amazement of his
family, walking perfectly well. He brought the
water up, complained of headache and drowsi-
ness, and I again hypnotized him, and told him
that these symptoms would pass off, and that he
would feel jolly. Again he was awakened and
his whole manner changed. He was lively and
walked around the room with ease. He slept
five hours that night, and in two weeks resumed
his business, and has been perfectly well ever
since."

Professor Bemheim, in his work on Suggestive
Therapeutics, says: "Since 1882 I have experi-
mented with the suggestive method which I have
seen used by M. Liebault, though timidly at first,
and without any confidence. To-day it is daily

used in my clinic; I practice it before my

101

Christian Science and its Problems

students ; perhaps no day passes in which I do
not show them some functional trouble, pain,
paresis, uneasiness, insomnia, either moderated
or instantly suppressed by suggestion.

" Here is a man twenty-six years old, a work-
man in the foundries. For a year he has ex-
perienced a painful feeling of constriction over-
the epigastrium, also a pain in the corresponding
region in the back, which was the result of an
effort made in bending an iron bar. The sensa-
tion is continuous, and increases when he has
worked for some hours. For six months he has
been able to sleep only by pressing his epigas-
trium with his hand. I hypnotize him. In the
first seance I can induce only simple drowsiness ;
he wakes spontaneously ; the pain continues. I
hypnotize him a second time, telling him that he
will sleep more deeply, and that he will remem-
ber nothing when he wakes. Catalepsy is not
present ; I wake him in a few minutes ; he does
not remember that I spoke to him, that I assured
him that the pain had disappeared. It had com-
pletely disappeared ; he no longer feels any con-
striction. I do not know whether it has reap-
peared." *

It must be remembered that the hypnotic state
may exist in different degrees. It is not in all
cases necessary that sleep should be induced. A

^ Bemheim, Suggetiive TherapeutieSf p. 206.

102

The Cures

person may be susceptible to hypnotic suggestion
who is conscious of no change from his normal
condition. The attention needs only to be so held
that the impression may be made deeply upon
the mind. It is very well known that simple
suggestion under favorable conditions may act
beneficially on the health. A cheei-ful home,
pleasant and hopeful companions, useful occupa-
tion, may do much in some cases to effect a cure.
Association with a strong and healthy mind is a
tonic to the weak. Says Dr. Cocke : " The psychic
impression which one person makes upon an-
other is, at the same time, the most subtle and
the most powerful sociological factor that exists.
Is it not reasonable, then, that association with
those who are congenial to us should prove a
stimulus which tends to restore health? " If;
then, the attention is held, and a profound ther-
apeutic suggestion is produced in the mind, the
conditions of hypnotism are met.

Webster defines telepathy thus: "The S3rm-
pathetic affection of one mind by the thoughts,
feeling, or emotions of another at a distance,
without communication through the ordinary
channels of sensation.'* If, now, this power of
the mind is real (and the facts of telepathy are
as conclusive as the facts of Christian Science),
then absent treatment by suggestion is possible.

The mind of the healer may travel a hundred

103

Christian Science and its Problems

miles to influence the mind of the sick with
which it is en rapport Mr. Hudson claims that
he has treated many cases successfully in this
way. Eheumatism, neuralgia, dyspepsia, sick
headache, torpidity of the liver, bronchitis, par-
tial paralysis, have yielded to absent treament*

Christian Science can produce nothing more
wonderful than the cures of hypnotism, and there
is such a close resemblance between their meth-
ods that we have every reason to believe that
they both come under the same law.

First, faith brings the two minds, that of the
healer and that of the patient, en rapport.
Whether or not the Christian Scientist will admit
it, she cannot and will not dispense with faith.
Herein the attention is secured ; and, second, a
therapeutic suggestion is made to the mind.
The healer insists that disease is a false belief of
mortal mind. The patient is to repeat in his
mind the affirmation of health. Silence is re-
quired, while the attention is fixed on the propo-
sition that matter is nothing; the mind cannot be
sick. The hypnotic state ensuea The healer,
oblivious of all else, seeks to impart the sugges-
tion of healtL Third, the first seance usually
proves only partly successful, which will require
another sitting, when the cure will be more pro-
nounced. Even if entirely successful the first

* Hudsou, Law of Psychic Phenomena^ p. 196.

104

The Cures

time, the suggestion will gradually fade from the
mind, and the bad feelings will return. This
the healer calls a relapse into mortal mind.
Bepeated seances give the suggestion a certain
vitality, when it is asserted a cure has been
effected.

Hypnotism follows the same steps with the
same experience. Indeed, all systems of faith
cure proceed silmilarly, and even the methods
pursued by barbarians in primitive times often
have a family likeness to these systema Solomon
O'Bail, a great medicine man among the Seneca
Indians, depended little on herbs. While the
patient sat on the earth before him his lips were
pressed to a rude flute, the soft music of which
was intended to exorcise the evil spirits that
caused the sickness and invoke the aid of the
great spirit The notes were in the minor key
and plaintive. The attention of the sufferer was
fixed, his faith was awakened ; both he and the
healer believed that a cure was to be effected. The
suggestion of health was imparted to the hypno-
tized mind; he recovered. Thus a Seneca In-
dian became renowned as a healer. He is one of
a class of primitive men that were forerunners
of all schools of mental healing, and should be
r^arded as representative of them.

But at the point of recovery by Christian

Science a fact emerges that shows its identity

105

Christian Science and its Problems

with hypnotism. It is well known that adverse
suggestion brings a relapse in hypnotic treatment.
The environment of the person must correspond
with the original suggestion. If he tells of his
cure in the presence of skeptical friends, their jeers
and laughter will destroy the suggestion of health.
Hypnotists cannot successfully cany out their
experiments in the presence of a skeptical audi-
ence, especially when the skepticism is open and
avowed. This is peculiarly marked in the higher
phases of hypnotic phenomena. Now, the healer
finds the same difficulty with her patients. They
return again and again for treatment. They are^
warned not to argue, then not to read the news-
papers, and to be careful of their associations, and
finally they are advised that mingling with church
people is fatal There is something Jesuitical in
this, for the poor invalid was first informed that
he was not required to leave his Church in order
to be a Christian Scientist, but he has come now
to the inevitable end ; he must separate from his
Church and seek an environment that conspires
with his faith and with the suggestion that has y
been made upon his mind by the healer.

Does the healer ever fail ? It certainly is not
to his interest to report the failures ; the cures,
however, are heralded far and wide. But these
cures cannot be received without question. Was
the patient really sick ? Has he been restored to

The Cures

health ? Are inquiries not answered by mere as-
sertion? On account of the idiosyncrasies of the
mind the patient himself is not always a reliable
witness. In a congregation of Christian Scientists
there are many cases of well men cured of imagi-
nary ills and of sick men who imagine themselves
well The failures are numerous. Many cases of
death from diphtheria, pneumonia, consumption,
and childbirth under Christian Science treatment
are reliably reported. It is not our purpose to
deny that cures have been effected, but the diffi-
culty of verifying them must be conceded.

In his valuable book on Faith Healing Dr. J.
M. Buckley submits a number of tests of the
theory of Christian Science. We quote especially
the following :

''^Second Test They deny that drugs, per se,
as taken into the human system, have any
power."

"Christian Science divests material drugs of
their imaginary power. . . . The uselessness of
drugs, the emptiness of knowledge, the nothing-
ness of matter and its imaginary laws, are appa-
rent as we rise from the rubbish of belief to the
acquisition and demonstration of spiritual under-
standing. . . . When the sick recover by the use
of drugs, it is the law of a general belief, culmina-
ting in individual faith that heals, and according

to this faith will the effect be." — Eddy.

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Christian Science and its Problems

Surely the mind needs healing that could invent
the following absurdity :

" The not uncommon notion that drugs possess
absolute inherent curative virtues of their own
involves an error. Arnica, quinine, opium, could
not produce the effects ascribed to them except by
imputed virtue. Men think they will act thus on
the physical system, consequently they do. The
property of alcohol is to intoxicate ; but if the
common thought had endowed it simply with a
nourishing quality like milk, it would produce a
similar effect A curious question arises about
the origin of healing virtues, if it be admitted
that all drugs were originally destitute of them.
We can conceive of a time in the mental history
of the race when no therapeutic value was as-
signed to certain drugs, when in fact, it was not
known that they possessed any. How did it
come to pass that common thought, or any
thought, endowed them with healing virtue, in
the first place ? Simply in this way : Man find-
ing himself unprotected, and liable to be hurt by
the elements in the midst of which he lived, for-
got the true source of healing, and began to seek
earnestly for material remedies of disease and
wounds. The desire for something led to exper-
iments ; and with each trial there was associated
the hope that the means applied would prove

efficacioua Then what was at first an earnest

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The Cures

hope came at length to be a belief ; and thus, by
gradual steps, a belief in the contents of the en-
tire pharmacopoeia was established." — Marslon,

It is true that in many cases the effect of a\
medicine is to be attributed entirely to the imagi-
nation, or to the belief that it will have such and
such effects ; but the statement of such extreme
positions as these shows the irrationality of the
theories upon which they are based. According
to the above, if it were generally believed that al-
cohol were unintoxicating, nomishing, and bland
as milk, it would be an excellent article with
which to nourish infants ; and, on the other hand,
if it were generally believed that milk were intox-
icating, all the influences of alcohol would be
produced upon those who drank it If the pub-
lic could only be educated to believe alcohol to
be nourishing, the entire mammalian genus might
be nursing their offspring upon alcohol with
equally good results. No insane asylum can fur- /
nisli a more transparent delusion. y-

That drugs produce effects upon animals has
been demonstrated beyond the possibility of con-
tradiction, and that, when the animals did not
know that they were taking drugs; and small
doses have produced not the slightest effect, while
large doses — the animals in each case not know-
ing that they were taking medicines — have pro-
duced great effect, and do so with uniformity.

109

Christian Science and its Problems

Also the eflEect of medicines upon idiots and un-
conscious infants is capable of exact demonstra-
tion.

Allied to the effect of drugs is that of poisons^
almost every drug having the effect of a poison if
taken in excess. Some poisons, however, are of
such nature that the smallest possible dose may
be attended with fatal results. In the case of an-
imals, poisons introduced into the system without
the knowledge of the animals do their work
effectually. Strychnine carefully introduced into
a piece of meat so small that a cat will swallow it
whole will in a very short time show its effects.
The instinct of the animal will cause its rejection
if there be the slightest possibility of perceiving
it ; but if sufficient means be taken to keep the
animal from knowing that it is taking anything
except meat, it will swallow the meat, and the
poison will do its work.

These facts are admitted by the advocates of
Christian Science and mind cure, and the lunacy
of their theories is seen in the manner in which
they attempt to account for the effects.

" If a dose of poison is swallowed through mis-
take, the patient dies, while physician and patient
are expecting favorable results. Did belief cause
this death ? Even so, and as directly as if the
poison had been intentionally taken. . . . The

few who think a drug harmless, where a mistake

110

The Cures

has been made in the prescription, are unequal to
the many who have named it poison, and so the
majority opinion governs the result." — Eddy.

"It is said that arsenic kills; but it would be
very difficult for anyone to prove how it kills,
since persons have had all the symptoms of ar-
senic poisoning without having taken any arsenic ;
and, again, persons have taken arsenic and did
not die. . . . Supposeyou take a child that knows
nothing about arsenic and administer the usual
dose ; the child will probably die, but I will show
you that the arsenic was not the cause of the
deatL . . . Here you may say, * What had the
life of the child to do with the action, the child
not knowing anything about arsenic ? * We will

* admit that the child was ignorant of the nature of
poison, but all who are educated in theology and
materia medica know that it kills ; therefore the

. thought, although unconscious to the child, was
hereditary in its life. It is, indeed, a universal
thought admitted as a fact in every life or soul.
A thought is a product of life, and is action, and
this thought, produced and accepted by life, acts
upon the life of the child and produces uncon-
sciously a confusion therein. This confusion pro-
duces a fear ; this fear in the child's life heats the
blood and causes the first conscious action." —
Arens,

" The effects of various experiments with chem-

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Christian Science and its Problems

icals and medicine upon cats and dogs are
studied most minutely by distinguished scientific
men, and the results witnessed published to the
world, with a presumption of wisdom and pro-
fundity of learning that carry the conviction to
most minds that the properties of such drugs and
their eflEects upon the human system have been
forever established. And materia medica falls
back upon these so-called demonstrations of
science as absolutely indisputable proofs of its
theoriea Now, it never seems to have occurred
to them that all the effects witnessed of such ex-
perimenting might be accounted for on the basis
of ifwught, and with the view of investigating the
subject to establish a totally opposite explana-
tion; and to show that mind acting on matter
could account for all their facts the following ex-
periments have been recently made : The object
of the experiments was a dog, a noble thorough-
bred, of great sagacity and intelligence. The
first experiment consisted in conveying commands
to him entirely through mind. Not a word was
spokeUj but his mistress would say to him men-
tally, * Carlo, come here,' or * Carlo, lie down,'
and although the thought might have to be re-
peated mentally a number of times, yet it would
reach him, and sometimes he would respond al-
most immediately. Second experiment : One day

his master discovered an appearance to which he

112

The Cures

gave the name mange. All the dogs around were
having it It was catching. Dr. So-and-so had
pronounced it mange, and prescribed a mixture
of sulphur and castor oil, etc., which was to be
applied externally in such a way that Carlo, in at-
tempting to remove the preparation with his
tongue, would get a dose into his system. But
here the mistress interposed, and insisted that
Carlo should be subjected wholly to mental treat-
ment The result was entirely satisfactory. The
appearance vanished as it came. Again the ex-
periment of placing Carlo entirely under the in-
telligence of his master's mind and thoughts for
a certain period was tried and compared with the
effects of leaving him wholly under his mistress's
mind. In the former case he soon exhibited every
symptom of dyspepsia and indigestion in every
form, to which the master was subject, and in a
very marked degree. But under the thought of
the mistress every symptom and appearance van-
ished at once. He soon attained a perfection of
physical condition, which constantly attracted the
notice of everyone. Experiments of this kind
were carried- much further, and can be by anyone
who wishes to test the matter for themselves. In
all the instances just mentioned the physical con-
dition of the dog responded to the mind under
whose influence it chanced to be. Love and fear

{especially fear) are the most marked characteris-
es) 113

Christian Science and its Problems

tics of the animal mind. The instances are in-
numerable where the instinct of the animal
surpasses the reason of man in detecting the
kindly thought or the thought of harm toward
itself. When a scientific experimenter gives a
drug to a dog it is done with a perfect certainty
in his mind that disorder, derangement of the sys-
tem, suffering, etc., in some form or another, are
sure to follow. A fear corresponding to the
thought of man instantly seizes upon the dog,
and various results do follow. The experimenter
notes them down and then proceeds to try his
drug on dog number two, all the while holding
in his mind an image of the results of experiment
number one, expecting to see similar results. In
all probability he sees them." — SiuarL^

Third Test Extraordinary accidents to the
body. Whatever may be said of the power of
thought in the production of ordinary disease,

^Mrs. Stuart in the foregoing passage is only a little more
absurd than Mrs. Eddy. *' The preference of * mortal mind ' for
any method creates a demand for it, and the body seems to re-
quire it. You can even educate a healthy horse so far in physi-
ology that he will take cold without his blanket ; whereas the
wild animal, left to his mstincts, sniffs the wind with delight.''
The connection of this quotation with what goes before shows
that the horse does not take cold, in the opinion of Mrs. Eddy,
because, having been accustomed to the blanket, his system is
80 weakened that he will take cold without it, but because the
training of the said horse has been such that he is led to believe
that if the blanket is not on, he will take cold !

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The Cures

the effects of accidents to persons who are en-
tirely unconscious when they ocxjur, as the sleep-
ing victims of railroad disasters, are facts which,
if they do not terminate human life at once, re-
quire the aid of surgery.

Mrs, Eddy says :

" The fear of dissevered bodily members, or a
belief in such a possibility, is reflected on the
body in the shape of headache, fractured bones,
dislocated joints, and so on, as directly as shame
is seen in the blush rising in the cheek. This
human error about physical wounds and colics is
part and parcel of the delusion that matter can
feel and see, having sensation and substance."

It is confessed, however, that very little prog-
ress has been made in this department :

Christian Science is always the most skillful
surgeon, but surgery is the branch of its healing
that will be last demonstrated. However, it is but
just to say that I have already in my possession
well-authenticated records of the cure, by mental
surgery alone, of dislocated hip joints and spinal
vertebras.

But records, to be well authenticated, require
more than an assertion. And the records may
be authentic, and what they contain may never
have been thoroughly tested. As they affirm
that "bones have only the substance of thought,
they are only an appearance to mortal mind ; " if

Christian Science and its Problems

their theories be true at all, they should be able to
rectify every result of accident to the body as
readily and speedily as diseases originating with-
in the systena.

Fifth Test The perpetuation of youth and the
abolition of death should also be within range of
these magicians.

Baldwin, of Chicago, says:

" Man should grow younger as he grows older ;
the principle is simple, * As we think so are we *
is stereotyped. Thoughts and ideas are ever
striving for external expression. By keeping the
mind young we have a perfect guarantee for con-
tinued youthfulness of body. Thought will ex-
ternalize itself ; thus growing thought will ever
keep us young. Eeliance on drugs makes the
mind, consequently the body, prematurely old.
' This new system will make us younger at seventy
than at seventeen, for then we will have more of
' genuine philosophy."

Mrs. Eddy meets this matter in the style of
Jules Verne :
/* " The error of thinking that we are growing old
and the benefits of destroying that illusion are
illustrated in a sketch from the history of an
English lady, published in the London Lancet
Disappointed in love in early years, she became
insana She lost all calculation of time. Believ-
ing that she still lived in the same hour that

116

The Cures

parted her from her lover, she took no note of
years, but daily stood before the window watch-
ing for his coming. In this mental state she
remained young. Having no appearance of age,
she literally grew no older. Some American
travelers saw her when she was seventy-four, and
supposed her a young lady. Not a wrinkle or
gray hair appeared, but youth sat gently on cheek
and brow. Asked to judge her age, and being
unacquainted with her history, each visitor con-
jectured that she must be under twenty."

That the above should be adduced as proof of
anything would be wonderful if the person ad-
ducing it had not previously adopted a theory
which supersedes the necessity of demonstration.
It is important to notice that if the belief had any-
thing to do with it, this amazing result grew
from a belief in a falsehood. She did not live in
the same hour that parted her from her lover ; .. / /h
she believed that she did, and, according to Mrs. ,^^ /V^ t)
Eddy, this belief of a falsehood counteracted
all the ordinary consequences of the flight of
time.

But the delusion among the insane that they
are young, that they are independent of time and
this world, is very common ; and the most pain-
fully paradoxical sights that I have ever witnessed
have been men and women, toothless, denuded of

hair, and with all the signs of age — sans teeth,

117

f-<^C

ir tU-

Christian Science and its Problems

sa7is eyes, sans taste, sans everything — some of
them declaring that they were young girls and
engaged to be married to presidents and kings
and even to divine beings. These delusions in
some instances have been fixed for many years.
I have had more opportunities than were desired
for conversing with persons of this class.

Granting the case adduced by Mra Eddy to be
true, and admitting that the state of the mind
may have had some effect, it is of no scientific
importance ; for the number that show no signs
of age until fifty, sixty, or even seventy years
have passed is by no means small in the aggre-
gate; we meet them everywhere. One of the
most astute observers of human nature, himself
a physician, solemnly warned a gentleman that if
he continued to take only four hours' sleep in
twenty-four, he would die before he was fifty
years of aga " What do you suppose my age to
be now ? " said the gentleman. " Thirty," said the
physician. "I am sixty-nine," was the reply,
which proved to be the fact

Mrs. Eddy, not content with this case, con-
tinues: "I have seen age regain two of the ele-
ments it had lost, sight and teeth. A lady of
eighty-five whom I knew had a return of sight.
Another lady at ninety had new teeth — incisors,
cuspids, bicuspids, and one molar." Such in-
stances as these are not uncommon, but are gener-

118

The Cures

ally a great surprise to the persons themselves,
and unconnected with any delusion as to flight of
time. They are simply freaks of nature.

There is a flattening of the eye which comes on
with advancing years, and necessitates the use
of glasses. Many persons who have few signs of
age, retain the color of the cheek, have lost no
teeth, and whose natural force is not abated, find
their eyes dim. According to these metaphysi-
cal healers this is not necessary ; but I have ob- >
served that a number of them say nothing about
being themselves compelled to use glasses.

Much is made of one case of a metaphysical
healer who, after using glasses fifteen years,
threw them away, and can now read even in
the railroad cars without them. Such cases of
second sight have occurred at intervals always
and under all systems, and sometimes when the
progress of old age had been so great that the
persons had suffered many infirmities, and had
but a few months left in which to " see as well as
ever they did in their lives.''

Some famous actors and actresses, without the
use of pigments, dyes, or paints, notwithstanding
the irregular hours and other accidents of their
professional life, have maintained an astonishing
youthfulness of appearance down to nearly three-
score years and ten.

John Wesley at seventy-five, according to testi-

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Christian Science and its Problems

mony indubitable and from a variety of sources,
not only presented the appearance of a man not
yet past the prime of life, but, what is more re-
markable, had the undiminished energy, vivacity,
melody, and strength of voice which accompany
youth. Nor at eighty -five had he exhibited much
changa

In the city of Chicago there died recently a
professional man, nearly seventy-five years of
age, whose teeth, complexion, color, hair, voice,
and mind showed no signs of his being over forty-
five years of age. Henry Ward Beecher, the
January before his death, could write to his
oldest brother that he had no rheumatism, neu-
ralgia, sleeplessness, or deafness, was not bald, and
did not need spectacles.

Meanwhile it is impossible not to suppose that
the case as described by Mrs. Eddy has been
greatly exaggerated. That some Americans
who saw her at the age of seventy-four supposed
her to be under twenty is to be taken cum grano
salts.

As for death, if the theories of these romantic
philosophers be true, it should give way : if not
in every case, at least in some. It is said that
there are hundreds of persons in Boston who
believe that Mrs. Eddy will never die. Jo-
anna Southcott, who arose in England in 1792,

made many disciples, by some estimated at one

120

Christianity and Health

hundred thousand, who believed that she would
never die ; but unfortunately for their credulity
she succumbed to the inevitable decree.

Christianity and Health.

When Christian Science insists on love as a
dominant principle in human life it is so far
Christian. If the Church of Jesus Christ fails to
realize love, it is so far unchristian. To the
Master religion was a life ruled by love. The
commandments of the Old Testament he con-
densed into one supreme law : " Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God with the whole of thy heart,
soul, and mind ; and thou shalt love thy neigh-
bor as thyselt" It was this law that directed
the heroic missionary endeavor and planted the
germs of social reformation during the first three
Christian centuries. Just as love led Christ to
the cross, so it inspired the early Christians to
the sacrifice of life, counting no gift too costly
tliat could add to human betterment It was
the golden cord that bound the primitive Church
together, and it has left its mementos in hymns
of praise, in prayers, and in noble apologies
for the truth, inscribed on parchments, on the
walls of the catacombs, and, best of all, imbed-
ded in the benevolent enterprises which it first
inspired.

Have we now become mere traditionalists,

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Christian Science and its Problems

instead of intimate disciples of the Master ? Are
we so engrossed with a theory of religion that we
have lost the spirit of love ? If so, we have de-
generated, and a power of life has parted from
us without which we are desolate.

The healing efficacy of love has not only its
spiritual, but also its physical, application. Chris-
tianity cannot be limited to a particular zone of
human life. The salvation of the soul with
reference to another world is a poor and imper-
fect substitute for the salvation of men in this
world. The helpful ministries of Jesus were ad-
dressed to the whole man. "He fertilized hu-
man nature to its farthest borders." He had life
for the soul, truth for the mind, and health for
the body.

We are not surprised, therefore, to discover
that Christianity has its medicinal value. Love
is health -giving. When a soul escapes its narrow
f cell, and goes abroad in God*s world profoundly
stirred with human interests, when it learns ten-
derness and sympathy, and is employed in minis-
tries of good, with the attention diverted from
self, the restorative powers of nature are given
freedom of action. The direction of the atten-
tion is of great importance to health. "The
highest medical authorities agree that attention
strongly directed to any part of the body will
produce physical change. If the attention is

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Christianity and Health

centered on the stomach, the digestion will
suffer; if on the liver, that will become de-
ranged. The vascularity of bodily organs and
caliber of the blood vessels can thus be made to
undergo a change. In short, the physical aspects
of attention are strongly marked." * Selfishness
is thus productive of disease and often prevents
cure. It magnifies every ailment, real or imagi-
nary.

" I know a patient," says Dr. Cocke, " who is
wealthy, who has everything in the world to live
for, social position, kind friends — everything.
He has the opportunity to do good and to be of
use in every way. He gives his money freely,
but he cannot give his better self, because it does
not exist It is impossible to entertain him with
anything. Books for him have no charm, the
theater no fascination. Music and poetry do
not reach him. The ambition to be successful
in business is not his, and all in the world that
he cares for, all that he cuddles and tends, are his
own feelings and complaints. He cannot be
reached even through the passions. Food and
drink have for him no temptations. He lives in
the world, bored by the things which should in-
terest him and make his life worth living. He
has tasted of everything. He has drunk of all
the good things of life. He has traveled, and yet

* Halleck, Education of the Central Jfervoua System^ p. 66.

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Christian Science and its Problems

the world has made practically no impression upon
him. Loving friends have nurtured and cared
for him, and he gives back only cold expressions
of love for their paina He does what he con-
ceives to be his duty, and, in the ordinary sense
of the word, he does it well. He provides for the
poor, he attends church, he is connected with a
great many benevolent enterprises, but love, the
one thing that makes life worth living, he has
never felt"

" In him ye are made full." Thus speaks the
apostle, and experience as well as philosophy
confirm his dictum. Even our personality is
realized in the personality of God, and in him
only can we attain perfection. The more closely i
we are allied to God the more perfectly we live.
Perhaps our failure is in realizing the indwelling
presence of God. Is God a great being in some
distant part of the universe, operating in our lives
only by his omniscience and power to control
"second causes? " Or have we come to under-^\
stand that " the power that rolls in the sea, that
shines in sun and stars, that stands fast in the
mountains, that utters its grace in the flower,
that breaks into melody in the note of the bird,
and that sweeps round man as physical environ-
ing force, is the power of the infinite will?"^.
This is the immanent God, " in whom we live, and

move, and have our being ; " " who worketh in

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Christianity and Health

us both to will and to work," and hence, without
whom in good will life is disharmony and dis-
ease; but when we are instinct with him ^ the
deeper currents of our life divinely impelled, as
are the movements of the tides or the courses of
the stars, we are exalted, buoyant, resistless.
y Touched by such a conception of God, the life
currents course with new vigor. Schleiermacher
witnesses to the exaltation it imparted to his en-
tire being : " Unenfeebled will I bring my spirit
down to life's closing period ; never shall the
genial courage of life desert me ; what gladdens
me now shall gladden me ever ; my imagination
shall continue lively and my will unbroken, and
nothing shall force from my hand the magic key
which opens the mysterious gates of the upper
world, and the fire of love within me shall never
be extinguished. I will not look upon the
dreaded weakness of age; I pledge myself to
supreme contempt of every toil which does not
concern the true end of my existence, and I vow
to remain forever young. . . . The spirit which
impels man forward shall never fail me, and
the longing which is never satisfied with what
has been, but ever goes forth to meet the
new, shall still be mina The glory I shall
seek is to know that my aim is infinite,
and yet never to pause in my course. ... I

shall never think myself old until my work is

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Christian Science and its Problems

done, and that work will not be done while I
know and will what I ought ... To the end of
life I am determined to grow stronger and livelier
by every self-improvement . . . When the light
of my eyes shall fade, and the gray hairs shall
sprinkle my blonde locks, my spirit shall still
smile. No event shall have power to disturb my
heart; the pulse of my inner life shall remain
fresh while life endures." *

This is communion with God in which we par-
take of life — blessed, eternal Ufa " This is eternal
life," says Christ, not will be ; a present posses-
sion, extending from the center to the periphery
' . of human existence. All life, when once we have
truly entered into it, is eternal life, and is good
even in its darker experienca It is the plan of
God; it is the order of nature. "When ones
thinks of life in man as one thing and life in
God as another he has lost the key to the science
of lifa Nothing deserves the name of life in us
that cannot be affirmed of God. Life in the soul
is the tide of the divine ocean flowing as it has
opportunity through the narrow channels of
human natura"' Christ came into our world
that we might " know God " in this intimate
sense in all spheres of the divine self-disclosure.
" I am come that ye might have life, and that ye

* Quoted in Continuity of Christian Thought^ p. 400.

• Th« Mind of the Master, p. 76.

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Christianity and Health

might have it more abundantly." Why, then,
should we mistrust life ? Why not live in God's
world as though we believed in God and in all
things that God hath made ? Even here unbelief
is disease, for it is a rupture with nature. He
only is normal who lovingly confides in nature.
This is health. Doubt antagonizes nature and is
followed by abnormality and death.

" He is able to save," but how? Not by some
power extraneous to nature. Not by the viola-
tion or suspension of the forces or laws of nature.
We have brought confusion and uncertainty by
emphasizing the "supernatural." We have cre-
ated a realm for God and a realm for the devil.
We have divided time and place into " secular"
and "holy." We have looked for signs and
wonders to supply the place of our ignorance
and to cover our sin. We have expected the
course of nature to be supplemented by demon-
strations of omnipotence.

But the miracle, if we may use a word for
which we find no equivalent in the original text,
consists in leading us back to nature, in persuad-
ing us that nature is a safe guide. This Jesus
did. He led us to see that all is nature, whether
in the spiritual or material world, because all is
under God, who is not lawless. This is true,
though a law of necessity hold in the one

and a law of personal freedom in the other.

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Christian Science and its Problems

Wonders and signs there may be, violations of
nature never. He exalted nature. His memoirs
are not a record of miracles. His own life was
supremely natural By no miracle did he pro-
vide the necessities of life. He labored at the
carpenter's bench and ate the bread of human
toil. He trod the dusty roads of life like other
men. His whole divine life was a submission to
nature in birth and joy and sorrow and death.
He declared that we must be horn again ; by a
process as natural as that of human generation
we must be restored again to life ; that we must
exercise the natural power of love ; that in fol-
lowing him we must die for the truth's saka
Thus we are saved by nature in accordance with
divine law. "Go thou and sin no more;'' re-
stored to peace with thyself and God, preserve a
life of harmony ; violate no more even the least
of nature's laws; be as true to nature as the
flower which God arrays in beautiful garments,
and enter on the endless power of a perfect life.
" First the blade, then the ear, then the full com
in the ear." Thus Jesus brings us back to nature.
Salvation by the power of nature, which is the
immanent God and the immanent Christ, is not
confined to the religious nor to the moral life. It
is perfect and full ; it is mental and moral and
physical and social and political. It is curative

to our sicknesses, and is even the most effective

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Christianity and Health

known germicide. It is destructive to all zymotic
diseases. Fai^hjnja^ilirfiy- not in incantations
and charms and relics and sorceries — this it is
that restoreajia.to health.

Mrs. Eddy informs us that hygiene and sani-
tary science are without efficiency.* Nature
affirms the contrary. Wesley declared his faith
in nature when he said, " Cleanliness is near akin
to godliness." We have learned that germs of
disease may float in the very air, and that epi-
demics may be conveyed in water. It is not faith
in nature that ignores these facts ; it is contempt
for nature. It is akin to ascribing disease to the
maledictions of Providence, and to prayer for de-
liverance that can only be secured by the shovel
The Mohammedans in Bombay offer long inter-
cessory prayers that God may abate the terrible
plague, but the British are securing immunity
from its perils by cleansing the huts, burning or
disinfecting the clothing, and isolating the sick.
Now let Christian Science compete in India with
sanitation and hygiene.

" In the latter half of the seventeenth century
the annual mortality in London is estimated at
not less than eighty in a thousand; about the
middle of this century it stood at twenty-four in a
thousand ; in 1889 it stood at less than eighteen in
a thousand ; and in many parts the most recent

1 Science aiid Hedit\ pp. 68, 66.
(9) 129

Christian Science and its Problems

statistics show that it has been brought down
to fourteen or fifteen in a thousand. A quarter
of a century ago the death rate from disease in
the Koyal Guards at London was twenty in a thou-
sand ; in 1888 it had been reduced to six in a
thousand. ... In the old Indian army it had
been sixty -nine in a thousand, but of late it had
been brought down first to twenty and finally to
fourteen. The Public Health Act having been
passed in 1875, the death rate in England among
men fell, between 1871 and 1880, more than four
in a thousand, and among women more than six
in a thousand. In the decade between 1851 and
1860 there died of disease attributable to defective
drainage and impure water over four thousand
persons in every million throughout England.
These numbers have declined until, in 1888, there
died less than two thousand in every million.
The most striking diminution of the deaths from
such causes was found in 1891, in the case of
typhoid fever, that diminution being fifty per
cent As to the scourge which, next to plagues
like the black death, was fomierly the most
dreaded — smallpox — there died of it in London
during the year 1890 just one person. Drainage
in Bristol reduced the death rate by consumption
from 4.4 to 2.8, at Cardiiff from 8.47 to 2.81, and
in all England and Wales from 2.67 in 1851 to

1.55 in 1888.

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Christianity and Health

" What can be accomplished by better sanita-
tion is also seen to-day by a comparison between
the death rate among the children outside and in-
side the charity schools. The death rate among
those outside in 1881 was twelve in a thousand ;
while inside, where the children were under san-
itary regulations maintained by competent au-
thorities, it has been reduced first to eight, then
four, and finally less than three in a thousand." *

We have here an illustration of nature's power
to aid us when we seek her. Eudiments of a
gospel of mercy are to be found in nature, and
the healing art has its place among them. Scien-
tific medicine is a thing of recent years, and
while theological prejudice did much to retard
its early growth, the time has now come when
the student of nature's mysteries is free to pursue
his investigations. Already the results are star-
tling. A well-conducted hospital is a demonstra-
tion that modem medicine is a genuine curative
agency. He who observes the process by which
a body torn and broken into pulp is shaped and
fashioned again by the surgeon's skillful hand,
the rapid healing by the use of antiseptics, and
the restoration to health by remedies judiciously
applied as aids to nature, cannot say, "This
might better have been done by the orisons of
priests or by some theurgy of faith."

* White, Warfare of JScimee^ vol. ii, p. 91.

181

Christian Science and its Problems

The modem physician must have wide culture
and a well-balanced mind, with the resources of
nature at his command. He has become an in-
dispensable factor of society. Nothing could be
more irrational than the substitution of self -treat-
ment or quackery for the services of a skillful
physician in a case of real need. And yet self-
treatment is one of the most common evils. It
is said that more than 10,000 men, who receive col-
lectively more than $4,000,000 per annum in sal-
aries and wages, are engaged in manufacturing pat-
ent medicinea "We surely have faith in drugs, and
it stands as an index of our indolence and of our
lack of faith in Ufa We neglect the laws of life ;
we forget that health demands simple fellowship
with nature ; we set upon a course of defiance of
nature, maintaining ourselves with drugs. Little
wonder we break down the defenses of health
and bring remedies into ill-repute. When we
have exhausted the pharmacopoeia the same in-
dolence and aversion to nature leads us to hunt
for some magic means of cure, some necromancy,
theurgy, some fountain of life. Alas ! in the end
it is futile; there is but one way, we must re-
turn to nature as obedient children ; we must be-
lieve in nature and do the works of faitL

There is a passage often quoted from Paracel-
sus, as follows: "Whether the object of your
faith be false or real, you will, nevertheless, ob-

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Christianity and Health

tain the same effects. Thus, if I believe in St
Peter's statue as I would have believed in St
Peter himself, I would obtain the same effects
that I would have obtained from St Peter ; but
that is superstition. Faith, however, produces
miracles ; whether it be false or true faith, it will
always produce the same wonders." The truth
of this observation is confirmed by the modem
miracle worker. A true faith, however, like a
faith in God, is better than a false faith, though
many of the results may be similar. A false
faith can never exalt character, and hence cannot
be ethically best for the body. Hence it is im-
portant that in the search for an object of faith
that will heal our sicknesses we should not adopt
one that will degrade the souL

" And he did not many works there because
of their unbelief." The want of faith cribbed
the power of the Master. Much as suffering men
needed him, the subtle bond of union, the medium
of life, was wanting. No mighty works, whether
material or spiritual, have ever been wrought
without faith. There is a limit to " understand-
ing," but " faith is the evidence of things unseen."

Faith in ourselves is indispensable, and it
should arise from the acquisition of self-knowl-
edge, and because we have learned that man is
the crowning product of the ages, the masterpiece

of God. The Christian life grows out of such a

133

Christian Science and its Problems

faith, as when the prodigal remembered that in
his father's house there was abundanca He who
realizes his divine ascent can no longer live in
the far country. Thus it is the want of faith that
benumbs, that stifles us ; we pause not to think
of what we are, of the sublime potentialities
stored within us, of our exalted origin and des-
tiny. Were all this real rather than an empty com-
monplace or an Arabian fiction ; were it a faith
like that of Columbus in search of a new world,
it would blight every evil thought in the bud.

Guyau, in his Education and Heredity^ speaks
thus of faith as a power in the right determina-
tion of life : " "When we say to a (hypnotized) sub-
ject, * You cannot move your arm,' we paralyze
the motor current that sets the arm in motion.
Hence I think we can establish the following law :
Every manifestation of muscular or sensory ac-
tivity does not take ejffect unless accompanied by
a certain belief in oneself, or by the expectation
of a determinate result, on the occurrence of cer-
tain antecedent conditions. The consciousness
of action is thus partly reduced to the belief that
one is acting, and if this belief is destroyed, the
consciousness itself becomes disorganized. All
conscious life is based on a certain self-con-
fidence. . . . Suggestion is the introduction
within us of a practical belief which is spontane-
ously realized ; the moral art of suggestion may,

184

Christianity and Health

therefore, be defined as the art of modifying an
individual by persuading him that he is, or may be,
other than he is. This art is one of the most im-
portant appliances in education. All education,
indeed, should be directed to this end to con-
vince the child that he is capable of good and in-
capable of evil, in order to render him actually so ;
to persuade him that he has a strong will, in order
to give him strength of will ; to make him believe
that he is morally free and master of himself, in
order that the idea of moral liberty may tend to
progressively realize itself." Thus it is true in
every part of our life that nothing palsies like
doubt, nothing adds to our motor power like faith.
Without faith in self the true end of life can
never be attained. Vegetation only is possible,
not health.

Faith in man will keep before our minds the
good in man ; we shall, therefore, think less of
the bad. Familiarity with the images of evil is
not conducive to physical well-being ; so far we
agree with Christian Scienca Pictures of vice
deprave the whole man. A perfect ideal before
the mind sweetens the fountain of life, which will
react gratefully on the whole body. Thus Christ
becomes a source of health to us. He stands be-
fore us the ideal of manhood ; communion with
him is a vision of the good ; he brings us into

touch with the best in man. To avoid evil we

135

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Christian Science and its Problems

need not shun men ; we may see them from the
archetypal point of view ; we may interpret them
mentally ; under the integument we may see the
expanding Christ-life in our humanity.

Faith in nature is the medium of communion
with natura Thoreau knew the mysteries of the
' i I woods because he had faith in natura For the
t^ same reason John Burrows knows the birds. Liv-
ing in close rooms is a violation of nature. Foul
gases were not made for the lungs. In the open
• fields, where sweet flowers bloom ; on the hillsides,
' f\r among the rocks and trees, by the side of rippling
*^j^^^ brooks and foaming cascades, where the warmth
, and cheer of sunlight are spread on everything,
; there is nature and there is health. He who has
" ' faith in nature will often find her quiet nooks and
" look through nature up to nature's God." Nor
will God be far away. There is in nature what
is known as the vis medicatrix naturce. It is the
tendency of nature to health, the healing power
of nature. Many diseases tend to recovery. Many
" supernatural " cures are traceable to this power ;
but because they are natural shall we, therefore,
say it is not the work of God ? Much rather let
us regard it as the immanent God thus manfest-
ing his goodness who finds the faithful child of
nature the most susceptible of his beneficent
operations. Faith in nature opens the way to the

vis medicatrix naturce,

186

Christianity and Health

Faith in Ood harmonizes life. To believe in
the moral purpose running through all things,
the ground of progress and ultimate perfection,
is to discard pessimism and to lift up the head
with undying couraga A true optimism builds
up the red blood corpuscles. Life is a failure
without hope; the body wanes under despair.
Hope helps the physician's remedies, hastens con-
valescence, wards off disease, and turns the atten-
tion from self to a bright and cheerful f utura

Faith, hope, love — this is Christianity's con-
tribution to our physical welfare. In a large
sense health starts from the spiritual center.
Disease there means disease throughout the en-
tire organism. A faithful, hopeful, loving spirit
tends to obedience, courage, perseverance, pa-
tience, cheerfulness — graces indispensable to
health. Materialism has engulfed too many phy-
sicians. They have little use for spirit; their
dependence is drugs. To them life is a chemical
product ; they deal with nothing that the scalpel
does not disclose. Possibly Christian Science,}
theosophy, and kindred movements are a nemesis
visited on our neglect of spiritual realities and ;
our practical denial of our universal relations, i
Christianity has been too largely devoted to self -
introspection, to unhealthy attention to states of
feeling, to insuring for eternity without regard to

time. Hence we have become sordid and earthy,

137

Christian Science and its Problems

the sorrows and ailments of the world have grown
upon us, while the spirit of healing has been
restrained.

The Church as the head of Christianity ought
to fill the nerve centers of the world with the
power of the spiritual life and transfigure this
material age with the glory of spirit Is it not
true that " the law of life has been from the be-
ginning the law of an increasing spiritualization
of matter?" As Professor Smyth continues:
"Life, in all its ascending power, beauty, and
worth, has been a continual access of spirit to the
creation. There is no profounder or more com-
prehensive conception of evolution than that
afforded by the law of the increasing fitness and
service of the material to the spiritual." The
mission of the Church is to accelerate this proc-
ess, and failure at this point would unfit it to be
the depository of the sublime teachings of Jesus
Christ

A Chistian church ought to be a congregation
of healthy minds. This should be one of the
notes of the church. The atmosphere of its audi-
torium should inspire normalcy of mind and
body. The exalted themes of its pulpit, un-
clouded by dark forebodings of the future and
prophecy of defeat, should be filled with the
beauty and sacrifice and perfection and victory

of Christ From such a place one should go forth

138

Christianity and Health

with a soul full of aspiration and right impulses.
Its pews should be coveted for the very sanity
and buoyancy of the environment It ought to
be the world's sanitarium, its influence conspiring
with all of nature's curative processes.

" Heal the sick " is Christ's command to the
Church. Medical therapeutics touches only one
side of the patient's need. Christianity must
treat the ethical side. In the case of insanity,
especially in its earlier stages, physicians encour-
age the rational and mental power that still re-
mains ; they seek to strengthen the will and the
power of self-control. This is the side of man
that Christianity should maintain in health. He
who fails to realize sanity and harmony of life
in the teachings of Jesus Christ misinterprets
their spirit and their aim. Did not Christ give
us the most exalted conception of man ? Was
not every man in his sight of priceless value, and
worthy to live his life at its best, even on the
physical side ? It was his inspiration that founded
the first hospital in the fourth century, an insti-
tution that has come to stand for the true inter-
pretation of Christ's command. For centuries
the Church of Rome has joined the church and
the hospital, and the Protestant world is now
awaking to the duty it also owes in the relief of
disease. The worth of man is a conception of

this age that is affording the largest opportunity

139

Christian Science and its Problems

to every human being. Every obstacle must be
removed ; twisted bones are straightened, poi-
soned blood is cleansed, that a human being may
have the largest possible chance to live the life of
a man.

Stbonq is the contrast between Christianity
and Christian Science. There is little hope to a
sin-sick world in a God who fades before the soul
like the colors in the evening clouds ; in a mor-
tal mind so "cribbed, cabined, and confined"
that it has only the most attenuated views of
life; in the negation of sin and the denial of r
evil, two bold facts in human life ; in that per- \
version of truth that makes the cure of physical
disease the key to spiritual harmony ; that re- ,
duces Christ to a doctor of the body ; that treats 1
our human ailments by creating a mental delu-
sion ; that, in brief, is only an American Bud-
dhism.

On the other hand, the old truth of the Gospel
holds a more commanding place in the world to-
day than ever in the past There is evil in the i
world, but Christ has come to conquer it by |
struggle, by sorrow, by death. He is not far
separated from the world, but is immanent in
human life, still struggling, suffering, dying, and
rising again, and through this very ministry he

is mediating the divine life to the world. God is

140

Christianity and Health

a person too infinite to be separate from an atom ,
of matter, and yet so transcendent that he cannot
be measured by the sum of all things that exist ^
He made man a personality capable of reducing
his very soul to chaos, or of cooperating with
God in building a world, and hastening the op-
erations of divine love and power. He has left
man to work out his own salvation, a task that
man is steadily accomplishing in the systematic
methods of science. He has opened the world
before us to be conquered by intelligence, a con-
quest in which man is to rise into strength and
moral beauty, into harmony and conmiunion

with God.

141

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