CHRISTIAN SCIENCE has accomplished a great work in compelling people who are affiliated with some one or other of the many Christian denominations to "search the Scriptures" as they had never done before in order to defend the doctrines which they had either accepted or inherited. In many instances this search is undertaken for the purpose of showing some Christian Scientist that his views are unscriptural, an attempt which can never result in aught but the illumination of the inquirer if he is honest and reasonable and if he sincerely desires to get at the truth.
In all such cases many unexpected discoveries are made along the way, the deeper study of Jesus' teachings revealing many things which are quite overlooked by the one who attempts to interpret these materially, something which is impossible except where one is content with a superficial examination of the New Testament. It is, however, surprising to see how many there are who quarrel with Christian Science because it insists upon rejecting or correcting the evidence of material sense at every point, and in so doing they are quite forgetful of the fact that physical science has been compelled to do this very thing in order to reach correct conclusions in any direction. Strangely enough, these people charge Mrs. Eddy with having upset a wide range of religious belief in denying the authority of the so-called physical senses and maintaining that they are no part of man's being as the likeness of God. Yet all Christian people deny sense evidence when they admit that the life of the individual continues after what is called death, and here they take issue with the materialist, who denies spiritual existence on the ground that we have no proof of man's immortality, in fact no material evidence to prove that lie is a spiritual being and governed by spiritual law.
In her wonderful address, given in Chicago in 1888, Mrs. Eddy made it clear that it was not she who had "inaugurated the irrepressible conflict between sense and Soul" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 10), but rather the demands of divine Science, a conflict, she says, which was "foreshadowed by the prophets and inaugurated by Jesus" (Science and Health, p. 288). By his words and even more by his works the Master showed that the material senses give no evidence of Truth,— they never reveal God who is Spirit, nor man as a spiritual being. What is more, they mislead at every step of the way. These senses give evidence of sin, disease, and death, and so far as they offer pleasure they intoxicate with mortal passion; hence we find this warning against them in John's first epistle: "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. . . . For all that is in the world ... is not of the Father, but is of the world." Besides this, they declare man to be sick and dying, and in so doing they paralyze natural energy with hopeless dread. How vain, then, to argue for the perpetuation of the senses, which neither reveal God nor His man, but which virtually deny both.
