"Christian Science."
We are requested by a dear reader to write on "Christian Science," and, believing that it is well for our people to be instructed in regard to modern heresies, we will try to comply with this request. The principles of the doctrine of "Christian Science" are very fanciful and vague. This religious sect was founded by a Boston lady, Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy. In 1866-7 it is claimed that she was apparently near death, when "her convictions laid hold upon the sublime verity that all evil, whether moral or physical, must be non-existent because contrary to the omnipotent Good, God." She thus professed to believe that there is really no moral evil, no wrong, no disease, because God will not allow that ot exist which is contrary to himself. She claimed to find a new meaning in the Bible, and to be "snatched from the valley of shadows, and to have her feet set on the rock." She laid down the principle that it is "through this understanding of God, through Christ, God's idea, that all healing must come," and adopted "Christian Science" as the name of this "curative system." She taught that there is no matter -- that all is mind. "Dreams are the conscious and unconscious states of matter; wherein the night dream is quite as real as the day dream, for life or mind is matter, in a dream at all times and is never the reality of Being." How strange this is! What we see and hear and feel is not a reality, and our wakeful experience and conscious being is as much a dream as our visions in the hours of slumber! She speaks of matter repeatedly, and yet asserts there is no matter, that mind is all that is real! There is really no physical evil, she claims, and yet she professes to teach the only sure and proper method by which physical evils may be cured. She professes to believe the Bible, which gives an account of the introduction of moral evil into the world, and of its ravages during all ages, and yet she says moral evil does not exist at all.The great wonder is that she should have any following, and the fact that thousands have fallen in with her fanciful and contradictory notions only demonstrate the fickleness of the human mind. The first church of this order was founded in Boston in June, 1879, with 26 members. This is called the "Mother Church," because from it all other churches of this order have sprung. It is now claimed by them that hundreds of thousands gratefully acknowledge the faith of this lady discoverer and founder of "Christian Science."
To show more fully what Christian Science is, if indeed it can be shown at all, we give some extracts from a letter written by Mr. McCracken to the editor of the American Messenger, and published in the Christian Science Journal, for January 1902. In that letter the writer says, "This faith does not teach any such nonsense as is involved in the statements that 'all the world is nothing,' and that 'there is no real body.' Christian Science teaches that the universe does, indeed, exist, and the body, too, but not as they appear to our five physical senses. Christian Science starts with God as Spirit, and shows God's universe, including man, is spiritual and not material."
Christian Science thus denies that any distinction is to be made between spirit and flesh, for it declares that all flesh, instead of being material, as it appears to our five senses, is really spirit. But Christ made a distinction when he said, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." Did Christ's five physical senses and superior divine wisdom deceive him? Again, Mr. McCracken says, "We read that God created all that was created, and saw that it was good. Unless we are willing to admit that 'sorrow, sickness, and death' are good, we must acknowledge that God did not create them, and if he did not create them, then they cannot be said really to exist. In truth, sin, sickness, and death do not belong to God's creation, but are unrealities trying to pose as realities, shadows pretending to be substance, negatives posing as positives. They are just as real as we make them in our thought, and no more." According to this there is really no sin, sickness, or death, only as we think they exist. Then Paul's thought was very deceptive when he said, "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin," and three of the evangelists thought what was not really true when they recorded that Peter's wife's mother lay sick of a fever. Sin never really entered into the world, death never came, and Peter's poor old mother-in-law was only acting the hy-po. These writers are excusable, however, on the ground that they wrote by the direction of the Spirit!
Mr. McCracken says, "Christian Scientists do not differ from all Christians in their determination to destroy sin." Then, after asserting that it is with them a question of method due to an understanding of the nature of sin, he says, "To start out by calling sin a reality is to give it an advantage which it does not deserve and which it does not possess." If "Christian Scientists" are determined to destroy sin, they must believe it exists. How they can believe it exists and not believe it is a reality is beyond our ability to comprehend. This writer also says, "The healing done by Christian Science is due to prayer, carried beyond mere petitions for favors into a realm of realization where the eternal Truth dwells." But what is meant by healing, we ask in all candor, if disease is not a reality? If no one is really sick, no one needs healing, in fact no one can be healed. Then who can believe that death is not a reality? According to the doctrine of Mrs. Eddy, the mother of "Christian Science," the words sin, and evil, and sickness, and pain, and death, are without meaning and have no real place in the English vocabulary. Our conscious existence is unreal, and our life, both awake and asleep, is but a fanciful dream! The credulity of the adherents of such a fanaticism is greatly to be pitied. The warning of Paul should not be forgotten: "Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the traditions of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ." Mrs. Eddy is the "mother" of "Christian Science." We don't know who its father is, but we know God is not.
J. R. D.
Copyright c. 2005. All rights reserved. The Primitive Baptist Library.
