The Sophistries of Christian Science

From the PREFACE. MATERIALISM, that old enemy so often worsted by Idealism, has marshaled his armies for perhaps a final stand. "Progress!" is his war-cry, and his pride is in the visible, the palpable works of his hands. Yonder stand the embattled hosts of Idealism whose rallying-shout like that of the other is "Progress!" She too has achieved, but not the outward, the splendour of cities, the wealth of nations, the commerce of the navigated sea. Men and women are her showing, eternal temples of the living God when the desert claims the city, and the nations are humbled to a name, a memory, and the sea itself has vanished, sunken from its central deeps. But who is the champion of Idealism, the Lord's anointed, empowered to overthrow the arrogant Goliath of Materialism? Some are with confidence asserting that Christian Science is that champion; notwithstanding which, it should be remembered that when many of the goodly sons of Jesse had. passed before Samuel; the prophet, at first deceived, was lead to ask if there were not others. Of Christian Science it must be said that, aside from its claim to heal disease, it little appeals to the great mass of the irreligious. As a religion its sway is chiefly over people once affiliated with the various sects of Protestantism, from the most conservative even to those known as the most liberal. The progressive thinker will hail any evolution of thought and its reaction on antiquating conceptions of Truth; but he laments chimera-chasing in all things, religion included. Investigating Christian Science, he discovers in its teaching that which allures the uncritical and the ungrounded of widely differing religious views. For the Trinitarian, Christian Science has First - Omnipresent Mind - the one God. Second - Life, Truth, Love, the Christ principle forever in the bosom of the Father. Third - Divine Science the Holy Comforter. To the Unitarian is explained that Christ and the Holy Ghost are the attributes of Unity. To the Universalist a novel view of his belief in universal salvation much appeals. For the Quaker, Christian Science promises to every soul a direct revelation of Divine Wisdom through the real man the mental image of God. The Shaker will find in Christian Science the Motherhood of God and the inculcation of a celibacy whose object is the gradual disappearance of the earth-inhabiting man. Even to the Romanist, something is offered, to wit, plenary revelation and the authority of a visible and infallible head. Because of conditions which pastors, teachers and physicians lament, it behooves the philosophical thinker to summon all his powers of mind to the detection and exposure of those insidious errors which hide beneath the fair exterior of Christian Science.