Sir:— The writer, who is not a member of the class called Christian Scientists, but who believes in consistency and fair play, desires, along with many others who think likewise, to know why it is that people are allowed to die under the ordinary and recognized practices of medicine at such a wholesale rate while failures to cure under mental treatment are quite rare, and when they do occur must be subjected to so much unfavorable comment, persecution and even prosecution? This prosecution, too, must be founded on evidence brought forward by the class of practitioners who are notoriously unsuccessful in their own way, and when sued for malpractice depend on the school of their kind for defence and thereby escape the punishment which, but for their confederates, would be sure to follow at the hands of justice. The plan pursued by Christian Scientists is a revival of ancient and successful methods of healing through influencing the mind, and mainly differs from ordinary medical practice in being more free from fraud. It is well known by physicians and is taught in their schools that influence on the mind of a patient is the principal factor in cure. Medicine is chiefly delusive— to engage the thoughts, turning them from despair to hope, whereby faith in the drug destroys fear of the disease. Drugs have no healing power and every intelligent physician who is honest will admit it as a fact.
In Christian Science there is an effort to bring into intelligent and practical application principles used in all historic ages for healing the sick. Influences on mind eventuate in disease, often in death. Why should not such influences be counteracted by processes purely mental instead of by deceptives, as is the case with drugs? In a Christian community there should not be any persecution for practising according to the teachings of Christ: "Greater things than these ye shall do because I go to the Father," and "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel," and "These signs shall follow them that believe. They shall heal the sick," etc.
Three or four years ago people were dying in Philadelphia at the rate of one thousand a week, and physicians were among the number. It ill becomes a plan, a system or a community to make a great ado it' here and there less than once a month in the United States a case is lost under the care of a class who are the closest adherents of Christian teaching, and whose history for the past twenty years is brightened by joyous lives whom "regulars" had given up as incurable. EQUITY—Philadelphia Press
