Among the vicious new legislation which the recent special session of the Iowa legislature enacted, there is a law that is aimed at the destruction of a church in Burlington that is known as First Church of Christ, Scientist. While the number of people who have accepted this faith is not so large as the membership of some of the other churches, still there are nearly a hundred people who have found spiritual and physical comfort in what they choose to term scientific Christianity, and the number includes some of the most intelligent men and women in Burlington. For any person, and particularly a law-maker in "free America," to undertake to proscribe or prohibit these people in a question that is purely one of conscience and self-preservation, seems to the Democrat-Journal to be the acme of presumptuous folly. A good many people in this city outside of the Christian Scientist Church are interested in the matter, and it is destined to be brought more prominently to the notice of the public within the next few years. The legislature has just passed, under the head of medical laws, a hybrid act which provides that no Christian Scientist may heal without having passed the regular medical examination before the State Board of Health, and procured a physician's certificate from that body. Penalties are provided for infraction of the law, the same being held as malpractice. This law is in contradiction to the Constitution of the United States. A sane man is a free moral agent to the extent that he may dispose not only of his goods and chattels, but of his soul and body as he sees fit, and the law cannot punish him justly. By the same logic a man cannot be seized and imprisoned for having committed suicide. There is a reason for laws that regulate and maintain the rights of one citizen as against another, but there is a point where the law must pause, and that is at the door of conscience, the portal of the inner man. If you are ill in body, and sound in mind, it is for you, not for the law, to say what you shall take for a remedy, or whether you shall take anything. If your wife, your child, or any one whom you love, be ill, it is not for the law to dictate the potion you must administer. In the affairs of human existence it makes a great difference as to whose ox is gored. There does not seem to have been in the whole Iowa legislature a man who was a member of the Christian Science Church, and therefore the body has dealt most radically with that subject which it knew least about—a subject that deeply concerns the spiritual and bodily welfare of an intelligent and considerable class of Iowa people. The law which this legislature has placed upon the statute books is so rankly unconstitutional, and so evidently a blow at man's "inalienable rights," that the Democrat-Journal predicts that it will never be enforced. No man or woman in any state in the Union has ever suffered a penalty prescribed by law for committing the act of calling upon God for help, either spiritual or physical, and no man or woman in Iowa ever will suffer the proposed penalty.
It has been the style and custom of the newspaper press to misuse, abuse, and ridicule the subject of Christian Science. The Democrat-Journal is not prepared to follow in this well-worn track. Notwithstanding the countless conflicting enactments of law-makers, and the innumerable contradictory decisions of the courts, to an American shall remain one indestructible right — the pursuit of peace, health, and happiness.—Democrat-Journal, Burlington, Iowa.
