"Woe unto them by whom offences come." When will people awaken to know that it is indeed woe to them that lift their voice and effort against the cause of God on earth? In my two years' experience with Christian Science I have noted the swift punishments that have overtaken those who have attempted to stay its progress. And the judgments have fallen upon each enemy on exactly the issue that he raised to dispute its right of way. Let those who have been identified with our movement note the singular calamities that have overtaken all they have heard decry its holy endeavors. I have been shocked at their suddenness sometimes, but always traced the moral connection even when slow of fulfilment. The pastor of the church I was a member of, refused me a letter of dismissal from his church and a recommendation to the Church of Christ (Scientist), on the ground that the Scientist Church was ''no church at all," &c., thundered his anathema against the godless, pantheistic theosophists making up our "so-called " church, till he razed its lofty pinnacles and demolished its jasper walls (metaphorically), so that we had not, in his belief, one stone left upon another to point to as a "Church." He went home to find that the merciless (or merciful) lightning had quite destroyed the interior of his own handsome church edifice, leaving only the fair exterior to boast of, and that a trembling shell unsafe to enter.
One church pastor who said that he would rather his family would die than be treated by a Scientist, in the name of Christ, lost his beloved father within a week. His prayers, while in his heart he hated his brethren, the Christian Scientists, were as the prayers of the wicked that availed nothing.
One who spoke of the intense contempt he held for the Scientists, lost almost immediately his pastorate, through the unexpected detection of a secret sin in his heart and life. Truly "the ways, of the Lord are-wonderful, and past finding out."
