The Evangelist, of New York, in a recent editorial relating to a Christian Science lecture, thus animadverts:—
"It is very certain that the life of that movement or church which calls itself by this name is that its members do practise and live by certain truths which have been the property of the Christian Church since our Lord revealed them, and that his Church has greatly suffered by not living up to her privilege and duty in this respect. It is safe to say that the philosophy on which Christian Science is based is a tissue of ignorance and misapprehension, but the lives of the great majority of Christian Scientists are a beautiful illustration of what certain teachings of Christ ought to have wrought in his Church long before this, and might have wrought, had the Church been more full of faith and less concerned with speculation."
We have made a special study of our editorial friend's deductions with the hope that we might be able to reconcile his conclusion with his premise, but we have signally failed. Moreover, we have arrived at the deliberate and definite conclusion that the fault does not lie with us. It lies rather in our friend's bad logic.
1. If it be true that the members of the Christian Science Church "practise and live by certain truths which have been the property of the Christian Church since our Lord revealed them, and that his church has greatly suffered by not living up to her privilege and duty in this respect," how can the philosophy on which Christian Science is based be a "tissue of ignorance and misapprehension"?
2. We are even more puzzled when we undertake to reconcile the second deduction of our friend. That a philosophy in itself a tissue of ignorance and misapprehension can produce a kind of people, the great majority of whom "are a beautiful illustration of what certain teachings of Christ ought to have wrought in his Church long before this, and might have wrought, had the church been more full of faith and less concerned with speculation," is a sort of logic so tangled that we doubt it the man exists who is wise enough to disentangle it.
This logic, however, we regret to say, is not confined to the editor of the Evangelist. We have heard it from others—clergymen at that.
The only possible excuse for such peculiar methods of reasoning is the old false and should-be-outworn notion that evil can come from good and that good can come from evil.
If those who thus falsely reason would do themselves the credit to read the Christian Science text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," written by a woman, we feel sure that they would be convinced that at last a woman has come to the rescue and given them an infallible rule whereby they can come out into the broad daylight of coherent and consistent methods of reasoning. They will find running all through that text-book his quintessence of sound reasoning: that Good and evil do not, and by the very nature of each cannot, commingle. The one is wholly irreconcilable with the other.
If this be true, bad results cannot come from a good source, nor can good results come from a bad source.
They will find, furthermore, that the logic of this textbook is based on the irrefutable logic of the Master Logician who declared, as an eternal fact, that "a good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit." Could anything be more simple? But as if to add a point to this invincible logic, so sharp that it would drill straight through the most flint-encased state of consciousness, he declared: "Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." We have italicized the "shall." By the' results ye shall know them. There is no loophole of escape covered by a verb less imperative.
With a logic quite as forceful, exact, and inexorable,— manifestly borrowed from the Master Logician,—the Apostle James interrogatively affirmed: "Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter? Can the fig-tree, my brethren, bear olive berries?" and he closes the argument with this direct deduction: "So can no fountain both yield salt water and fresh."
Has not the time arrived when those assuming to be logician, when they criticise Christian Science, should go to the Bible to find their logic? And having so long neglected to do so, was it not high time a woman were pointing them thitherward?
