A Last Word About Christian Science. 



173 



to lose the reckoning of time, and to think it stands still, is to remain 

 young — and so on, and so forth. 



As to what Matter is, scientific men are not agreed. Whether water, 

 for example, should be called matter, whether its component gases 

 should be called matter, or whether the possible something that lies back 

 of these gases should be called matter, is an open question. For our pur- 

 pose matter is what we see, feel, or appreciate by our senses — the so- 

 called "first notion" of matter. Matter is forever changing its form, 

 so that the egg of to-day will be the chick of to-morrow, and the man 

 of to-day the dust of to-morrow. If pain is a figment of the imagi- 

 nation, a mere belief, is not pleasure equally so? Incapacity to suffer 

 must mean incapacity to enjoy — in our present state. If the evi- 

 dence of the senses cannot be accepted in sickness, it cannot bo 

 accepted in health; for the senses must report what they feel, and if 

 they are liable to error in reporting pain they are equally liable to 

 error in reporting pleasure. We are not yet disembodied spirits, and 

 must therefore depend on our senses a while longer. Let us not try 

 to be angels before our time. 



The chief if not the only credential of Christian Science is its al- 

 leged success in curing disease. But the cause of the alleged cures, 

 not the cures themselves, is the point at issue. As to how they are 

 brought about will be considered further on.— The religion of Christian 

 Science is a sort of pantheistic idealism, a groping after the solution of 

 the problem of the one in many, an endeavor to get behind the scenes 

 and view the invisible, to know the unknowable, or as one has face- 

 tiously said, to scrute the inscrutable. 



Christian Science is an illusion, that is, a partial view, an effort to 

 make general that which is exceptional, in short, is a rule made of ex- 

 ceptions. I believe it to be true that the persons who have gone over 

 soul and body to Christian Science have done so (1) because of a men- 

 tal bias to the mysterious, (2) lack of a scientific education and there- 

 fore of data by which to judge of the alleged facts, (3) lack of perspec- 

 tive in which to view it as a whole, and (4) a recoil from an excessive 

 materialism. They are not aware that other and very different agents 

 We been in all ages just as powerful curative means as Christian Sci- 

 ence. They have been brought into too close contact with it to see it in 

 all its aspects, and need to isolate themselves from it in order to distin- 

 guish its truth from its errors. The lover sees no fault or defect in his 

 beloved, but his neighbors not so near or interested see that she is not 

 v ery unlike many of her companions. 



Christian Science is therefore more significant as a criticism of those 

 embracing it, and as a sign of reaction against the materialistic habit 



