Although it seems natural to the human mind to accept its theology as a family inheritance, such a proceeding is none the less of doubtful value, if not dangerous, in that it binds one to a religious attitude grounded in sentiment and association, and not at all in individual reason or experience.
Once pledged to a religious course and accustomed to its mental routine, the inertia of the human mind is appalling. Limited by a dogmatic narrowness of view and jealous sectarian pride, such self-satisfied thought, on the defensive from the beginning, resists not only its own enlightenment, but chafes and frets over that of others, exalts trivial circumstance in place of Principle, and blindly nurses perverted tradition until it assumes for its adherent the sanctity of original truth.
Mental disease like this calls for radical treatment, best appreciated through some novel experience which, breaking the force of prejudice and routine, arouses independent effort and nourishes spiritual ambition by actually satisfying its growing desire. That Christian Science affords such incentive in unusual degree, even its opponents concede. It comes most often as a surprise to men in their physical distress,—a wilderness uncharted by traditional Christianity,—and saves them from their hopelessness; but at the same time it compels abandonment of easy compliance in the habitual and conventional, and of devotion to an adulterated, emasculated tradition, and impels allegiance to the truth itself, demonstrable and effective, which has healed them. Thus awakened, a man's regeneration begins, and through normal growth attests the divine efficacy of scientific Christianity by its complete transformation of human attitude and ideal.
