Ignominious silence is displeasing to Justice, else readers of the compiled lectures on "Faith Work," by L. T. Townsend, might be pardoned for passing the book by as unworthy note or comment. Its ungentlemanly, unchristian, malignant as false comments on Christian healing have elicited the severest denunciations of Christians everywhere; its low personalities meet with lofty scorn.
This author quotes broken passages from Science and Health, and abstractions of its Science, ambiguous to the carnal mind, separates sentences from the context, changing their entire meaning, and presents them to his readers as literal—an abuse by which even the Scriptures can be subverted. Then he pronounces the entire work destitute of reason, and the author an impostor, pantheist and infidel.
It is unprecedented—his uncalled for attack upon a woman forty years a member in good standing of the Orthodox church, and recommended by its pastor to sister churches when herself became pastor of the Church of Christ, in Boston. Likening her pious ministrations to the barbarous proceedings of a colored outcast, is like the dark cursing of some lost soul pictured by the old poets, startling the age with its hideousness.
