Has material medicine satisfactorily answered the age old query, How shall the sick be healed? Confronted by the problem of disease and its cure, men have turned to matter, to drugs, to "other gods;" but have these solved the problem? Apparently not, since there is more disease to-day, or rather there are more names for diseases, than ever before in the world's history.
The Christian Scientist has no quarrel with the physician but Christian Science, as a system of healing disease. is unalterably and unequivocally opposed to all material forms of cure. It is opposed not only to those forms of cure which are professedly material, but also to those which are commonly regarded as mental, in which the "mind" employed is the material mind of mortals. Christian Scientists do not "run down" the doctor, they do not try to dissuade others from taking drugs, nor indulge in caustic sarcasms at the expense of the physicians; nevertheless, healing by Christian Science cannot be practised without diverging sharply from the drugging system.
The severest arraignments of medical practice have come from its own members, though now and then a distinguished layman has spoken freely. Christian Scientists would not think of saying what has been said so freely by many leading medical men, and one reason why they would not is that they do not know as much about the drugging system as their brethren of the medical profession. No one is so well qualified to expose the mistakes of medical practice and point out its shortcomings as the thoughtful student who has a personal acquaintance with the subject.
