[Readers of The Christian Science Journal will be interested in the editorial note on the writer of the following article, as it appears in the Table of Contributors to the December (1913) issue of The North American Review: "'A Churchman' is a priest in the Protestant Episcopal church. His work among his own people and his observations of those outside his communion have led him to the conclusions embodied in the present article."]
IF correctly reported, the church commission on healing the sick says, "Any attempt on the part of the clergy to enter into competition with the medical practitioner by any separate and independent treatment of the sick is to be strongly deprecated, not merely on practical but also on religious grounds." This statement disregards the commands of the Christ. It reveals ignorance of the practical and religious grounds on which the remarkable success of Christian healing is based. It rejects the central fact of the kingdom of God, which is the superiority of spiritual power over every form of physical phenomena.
The writer would submit the proposition that Protestantism must substantially adopt the faith and practise of Christian Science if its churches are to fulfil their mission to the world. This conviction is the result of several years' critical and philosophical investigation of the doctrines and practise of Christian Science compared with the experiences and observation of many years as a priest of the church. The fact that such a proposition shocks the church sense and meets with contempt is presumptive evidence of its truth. Men do not condemn a movement unless they feel its influence penetrating their prejudices and false positions and awakening them to unwelcome truth. The church always has denounced and persecuted whatever has not accorded with its inherited traditions and formulated beliefs.
This new-old faith is to be regarded not so much as a denomination, as a fellowship aiming to realize in daily life the art of being a Christian, the science of which art involves spiritual laws which are as capable of demonstration now as during the life of the Master. Its scientific value is found in the personal experiences of about a million of its students in every part of the world, who work out in their consciousness and acts the same kind of life which was in Christ Jesus. Such testimony cannot be affected by the witness of those who have not had similar experiences. It is unfair to judge them from any point of view than their own, which is the absolute and the spiritual.
All agree in the fact that as church-members they could not find the spiritual help they craved and could not be aided by the ministers to find God or to understand Jesus Christ. In Christian Science they claim to have found satisfaction in these particulars. It is fair to suppose that their statements are true, inasmuch as their word was never questioned when they were active members of these churches, and their leaving the churches can hardly be a proof of deterioration, especially in the face of their consciousness of having become better Christians than ever. If they changed their church in spite of their love of the associations they had formed in childhood and many sacred ties, through the push of dissatisfaction because their souls were starving and the pull into a communion where at once they were fed with available and living truth, and realized in membership a happiness upon a higher plane than ever before, it is evident that so far as they are concerned the church lacked an essential which Christian Science possesses and which the church must adopt to retain such members. If a majority of these people tried every resource of medical science and received no benefit, and lost all hope when told that nothing more could be done for them, and reluctantly and with no faith in Christian Science tried it and found healing through the apprehension of Truth, then for them this religion is identical with primitive Christianity. Their testimony shows that they would not have gone into Christian Science had the church been as Christian and as scientific.
In our churches today multitudes feel the same dissatisfaction at the materialism, the selfishness, and the absence of a sense of God. The most conservative apologists of our church admit that somehow, somewhere, something is wrong, but find in the fact of such admission an evidence of spiritual life which they hope will become supreme after the forms, forces, and truths in this transitional age shall have been precipitated as the base of a new order. The church querulously wonders why so many thousands are leaving it for agnosticism, socialism, and material pleasures, when it only has the words of life. To save itself it frantically resorts to every kind of attraction to interest people. It shifts its activities into social, civic, economic, and political reforms, institutes social commissions, urges the federation of national denominations, and proposes very pretty schemes for church unity and some absurd plans of evangelizing the whole world. The church seems afraid to venture on the purely spiritual life which all people crave. It is as true of a church as of a man, if one "have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his." Christian Scientists the world over testify that having "the mind of Christ" is the goal toward which they are daily striving and which they could not find as the aim of the churches they left. It seems clear that Protestantism must adopt this purpose as its reason of being, if it would hold and attract individuals of the same disposition as those who have left its communions. It may be many years before our church will grow into the spiritual conditions which make possible an adoption of the essential contents of Christianity which distinguish Christian Science. Thirty national denominations allied in federation, with twenty million communicants, refuse to recognize it, although it is working for the same end and in a better spirit. The denunciations by many ministers reveal a lack of thought and of kindness which raises a suspicion that the fear of losing members rather than love of truth may account for their hostility. Perhaps, because they resent the impertinence of mere laymen teaching us accredited and infallible guides how to find God!
If we study the relation of the church to its work of salvation, the need of the adoption of Christian Science becomes imperative. Our failure successfully to apply Christianity to existing conditions is preventing its function of regenerating the world. The church must serve the people with religious truth. We have an army of over thirteen million children of school age marching into citizenship and control of our government without any Sunday school instruction, and many millions more growing away from the church. About fifty million persons are outside of any direct influence from our churches.
The publicity revealing so many shocking evils in our civic and social life and economic relations makes clear the fact that the church so liberally distributed in all parts, of our cities and country has failed to prevent their existence. The church stands for the deliverance of the country from everything false, unlovely, and debasing, and many church-members are creators of these evils. The head of the clearing-house for defectives says: "In New York we have twenty thousand defective children, largely the direct result of the overwork and overstrain to which their mothers are subjected in factories. Conditions are worse here than in any other country of the world." In order that a few thousand may have large wealth, millions suffer. Two million children who should be at school and at play are compelled to work in canneries, mines, and factories. Two hundred and fifty thousand are being starved or their vitality is lowered by adulteration of foods. There are more inmates of our insane asylums than of all our colleges and universities —that is, we are destroying minds faster than we are giving higher education.
The church stands for everything normal, but does not prevent conditions, largely social, which wreck health. Every year millions die of preventable diseases, notwithstanding the efforts of the best medical skill, and about all the church does is to advise the bereaved to be resigned to the will of God, "who knows best, and does not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men." Multitudes live below the living wage, unable to lay up for old age or the rainy day, but it does not seem to interest the church, which is satisfied with theoretical teaching of the law of love. What an invective against our church as a regenerating power are the child labor scandals and white-slave traffic, arson trusts, vice trusts, and thief trusts, gambling, alcoholism and drug habits, sickness, slums, poverty, insanity, sexual diseases and crimes of all sorts, and the cursing, the moaning, and the baby sobs of industrial slaves!
We of the church know that every one who puts the things of material life above the values of human well-being is indirectly a party to the system of oppression of divine manhood. Yet we retain these bad members because they are sound in doctrine and help support the church. It points with pride to its gift of the hundred million dollars annually to charities and its larger amounts for education, church support, and missions. As four per cent of our population at the most productive age is not only incompetent but a burden on liberal givers, such a sane management is demanded of Christendom that this proportion should be gradually reduced and incompetency be forever prevented by destroying its causes. The "labor question" is played with by those who, constituting the body of Christ, lack his earnestness when he said to the eminently respectable church-members who economically enslaved the people, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"
The trouble with the church is that it is too materialized to effect spiritual results. Even most of its good works are of the carnal mind life. No change of name can cause a change of character. No federation or union of materially-minded denominations can ever produce organized world power to bring in God's kingdom. Churches living for themselves do not even see the real Christ, because the spiritual kingdom can be discerned only spiritually.
The practical effects of the adoption of Christian Science would be that not one member of the church would be found in any way connected with business which puts human well-being below material interests. The evils of diseases in wrecking homes and bringing into being children cursed with sterility, blindness, deformity, paralysis, and insanity would be banished. Three million people in this country who are abnormal and who cost us annually two hundred millions, would ultimately be saved. Illness and poverty and sin would be prevented, and the spiritual kingdom would be realized. Such a statement would be chimerical were it not demonstrable. Hundreds of thousands bear witness to having risen through Christian Science into a spiritual consciousness in which sin, poverty, and sickness cannot exist. Here is the dynamic of love, which can regenerate the world and elevate the underworld of crime and misery to heavenly places of holiness and joy.
The writer by personal investigation and critical observation has found desiderata in Christian Science which do not obtain in our average churches. How desirable it would be if our churches, like theirs, could have ninety per cent of their members regularly attend a mid-week meeting, irrespective of unfavorable conditions! No topic of conversation is of such interest to Christian Scientists as their faith and practise. They talk of it with joy, and practise it with enthusiasm. With us it is taboo, or spoken of with apology and usually voted stupid. They never resort to the methods of raising money so common in the average church. There is no discrimination between rich and poor made invidious by pew rentals. They are daily striving to have the Mind of Christ Jesus, and are slowly becoming godlike.
Their text-book says that no one can become a true Scientist until he leaves all to follow Christ, and their persistent endeavor is to leave every carnal attraction to gain the life hidden with Christ in God. Their courtesy and patience under exasperating treatment are unusual. It does seem as if they come nearer to loving their enemies than any other class of Christians. They so respect individuality that they will not serve or treat even those who need their help unless asked to do so. Healing sickness is with them as much a religious duty as destroying sin. Both are simply a manifestation of the inner spiritual life which they are constantly striving to have more abundantly. This practise of primitive Christianity by the disciples for nearly three hundred years, which was lost to the church when the Holy Spirit was driven out, is now undoubtedly restored in Christian Science. If the church should adopt it, there would be manifest the strongest evidence of the renaissance of Christianity.
The glory of our church is its missionary work, but there is a deplorable lack of knowledge, interest, and appreciation concerning its extension, activity, and support. The Christian Scientist is an enthusiastic propagandist, a radiating center of his belief, not forcing his faith upon any one, but letting his good works reveal his Father. In a few decades these people have extended the knowledge of their faith to every part of the world. Every day in every land they are systematically studying the same selections from the Bible and from their commentary on it. Lecturers make trips around the world, teaching clearly just what Christian Science means. Two monthly magazines, a weekly paper, and a daily newspaper which is a model of Christian journalism, are sowing the seeds of truth everywhere. The fine type of Christian character, the striving to have the Mind of Christ Jesus, the art of healing as an expression of its practical theology, the business prosperity, pure living following clean thinking, the spirituality, the loyal citizenship to the kingdom of God with its ardent missionary spirit—these are the undoubted fruits of the Spirit. Such fruitage is not common in the average church. Besides this superior product, the theology of Christian Science is more scientific than that which is popularly accepted by the churches. To them the primary quest is the kingdom of God, and they realize that in their increasing material prosperity things are indeed thrown in as the promised by-product.
Both they and the church agree that the God, whose is the kingdom, is the one and only God. He is Spirit, Love, Life, and Truth. He is infinite personality, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. We believe this as a reasonable proposition. They believe it as a working Principle. Our God is an enlarged likeness of sinless man. He comes down to us by incarnation in Jesus and is diffused through humanity by the Holy Spirit. We call Him by prayer and meet Him in hallowed localities and in sacraments. Often, instead of worshiping God we find we are worshiping only an idea of Him, and a dead idea at that.
The Christian Science concept of God is free from the material limitations of anthropomorphism. It makes God infinite Principle, Love, everywhere present in all the fulness of His infinite personality. On this concept it bases its beautiful theistic idealism. God is what He is wherever He is. In such a presence, completely filling the universe with His being and its manifold expression, other gods are unthinkable; so are sin and things false and selfish. The average churchman constructs his own Pantheon. Because his God sits aloof from human interests, he gives his little divinities God's place in his life and conduct. The Scientist, knowing only one God, is a zealous destroyer of false gods in his own life and everywhere.
Wherever God is, He is omniscient, and therefore needs not to be told what we want as if He had not thought of our needs when He created the world. Everywhere He is omnipotent, hence any power contrary to Him and His purposes and laws is inconceivable. He is everywhere operative and operating all the while, and always available for every one's needs. From these facts of absolute and infinite being, the Christian Scientist draws practical conclusions and applies them to his daily needs.
The church makes the creation of man chiefly material. Christian Science makes it wholly spiritual. Both teach that man was made in the image and likeness of God. The church holds that sin destroyed this image and that God sent misery, disease, and death as a curse. Total depravity and original sin became racial and universal facts. Christian Science believes that because man was made like God, he is thereby perfect. The real, spiritual man could not fall. The material man cannot be real, nor can real man be both material and spiritual. If man, separated from God, could so overcome evil that he could ultimately become like God and reach a stage where he would be unable to fall, then God would have given to fallen man the power to create, with the help of sin, a superior man to the one He made without the aid of sin.
As to how there could be sin in a perfect creation, no explanation is found which can harmonize conflicting difficulties. The church says God gave man free-will and foresaw that by its exercise he would disobey. By this decree, God was either not able or not willing to prevent the fall, and by it the entrance into the world of sin and death. He used the situation, however, as a background to display His mercy and love to man. By blood atonement He would become reconciled to man, and so man would be saved. Again, making a better man by the aid of sin than the one created in His image.
The problem of how the illusions of false sense came into seeming existence is not as interesting or important to Christian Scientists, as the problem of how to escape from discord in order to enter harmony. It is their business, as it was the Master's, to uncover the nature of error vitiating the human consciousness, and to show men the Principle which, applied, will effect its elimination.
The church and Christian Science agree that only through the atonement of Jesus Christ can man be saved. Against the numerous theories of the atonement we state the Christian Science interpretation as follows: God never needed to be reconciled to man, but the "natural man" must be reconciled to God. Jesus the Christ came to reveal our essential oneness with God and the consequent perfection of our spiritual selfhood. This realized would cause us to crucify whatever tended to separate us from Him. God is regarded as just as much interested in our individually doing our part in the atonement as He was in Christ Jesus doing his part as the type or pattern for humanity.
The life of Jesus was a manifestation of his oneness with God, the source of all power and of the sovereignty of spiritual understanding over all the beliefs of material sense. By his realization of this at-one-ment he healed the sick, cast out devils, walked on the water, hushed the storm, raised the dead, laid down his life to take it again and to rise out of the material bodily sense of being into the spiritual realities of God's kingdom. This revelation of man's oneness with the Father makes one conscious of his perfection as the reflection of the perfect God. Being at one with God, our individuality is no more an independent entity than an idea coming into our consciousness can be an exclusive possession. Our life is simply an expression of the infinite Life, as an idea is the expression of universal Truth.
The explanation of Christian Science healing is found in the fact that all evil is the phenomenon of false sense, which is dispelled by the dawning of truth in human consciousness. The lie of evil being cast out, its phenomena of sin and sickness must disappear. If we explain the presence of sickness as sent by God, we have perfection sending imperfection, harmony expressing discord, and Truth originating falsity. A good God then must think evil. If indeed God could send it, only goodness should be seen in it, and man should regard it as normal and something to thank Him for, and might be pardoned for holding that Jesus, and physicians and health engineers, in trying to prevent it and heal it, are opposing the divine will, and that the church is right in not trying to remove physical evils. Their healing is an expression of working out their redemption by atonement, not as a theory, but as a divine organic oneness which must be personally demonstrated to reveal its reality. Gaining the consciousness of divine indwelling and of God's kingdom within them, they by faith and spiritual understanding know that sickness cannot be in the same presence, and that these ills are unreal, though to false sense intensely and painfully real. They reason that if God be everywhere present, anything unlike Him can be nowhere present. If He be omniscient, error and its inharmony can be never in such a presence. If omnipotence be everywhere, no power can be anywhere against it. If illness be real, it must be outside of God or within Him. Omnipresence makes it impossible for it to be outside of Him. If within Him, then there would be evil in the divine Mind—also impossible.
If this idealism which is so real produces better lives, healthier and purer living than Protestantism is producing, and its fruitage proves to be identical with that of primitive Christianity, the church must adopt it as the true science of the Christian life. It has the dynamic of a faith which worketh by love, opens spiritual understanding, makes God a real presence, and by thus transforming the life becomes a world power.
To realize its mission as a world regenerating life, it must appeal to that which is fundamental in every religion, race, and civilization. It must demonstrate its efficiency to improve upon the inherited beliefs from which they get their inspiration. The Protestant missions in their aggressive, heroic, and cooperative ministry are heavily handicapped by the failure of the church to regenerate its own life and make its own country come up to the standard which it earnestly holds up to the so-called heathen. The kingdom of God removes sin, sickness, poverty, fear, worry, and their results. The regenerating church, as part of the expression of that kingdom, must show all nations how in its own country it has been able to do this. Until this has been done, among its own members at least, it cannot expect to demonstrate its practicality. It fails to do this. Christian Science organizes no civic, social, or political movement to destroy evil, but discloses evils in the individual, and applies divine Truth, Life, and Love to eradicate them. It removes economic distress and slavery by the love coming from the atonement of Jesus Christ. Its teaching states the ground of economic freedom and shows the law by which poverty may be abolished anywhere in the world. To effect this, one has only to follow Jesus in praying to God as the spiritual source of all supply. Thousands have become missionaries bearing witness to its efficiency in relieving them from penury and business distress.
To remove illness as a cause of many resulting evils, one must do as Jesus did, who opened his life to let God through upon those who by faith opened their lives to receive him. Our church is recognizing this duty as its function, as seen in its Emmanuel movement and its commission for instituting an office of healing by anointing and prayer. Protestantism is not competent to teach the full gospel unless it includes healing the sick as an evidence of God's presence in the lives of its members, and adopts the Christian Science method as practically identical with the way of Jesus Christ. To destroy sin is, among our churches, largely a matter of egoistic will-power. The way of Christian Science is to see the sin disclosed by some temptation, and then to bring into the consciousness the sense of Christ's truth which expels the sin. This is based on the way Jesus resisted temptations. He kept sin out by always keeping God within. God as the only cause can effect only positive holiness, and therefore utterly abolishes its negations.
The Christian Science interpretation of the Bible gives catholicity for a world-transforming religion identical with the primary and ultimate purpose of Christ's Christianity respecting sin. It is one with the Old Testament tracing of evil to a perverse will. It also is one with the Aryan philosophy, which finds that error, or a disturbance of the harmony of truth, is the cause of sickness and sin. The expulsion of negation by its positive is the most effective way of driving out sin and sickness and their resultant evils. It destroys false beliefs because when Truth comes in, error, the unreal, goes out. When Life enters, discords, sickness, limitations, and want leave. When Love is admitted, fear, worry, and all forms of selfishness are cast out. Everything unlike God, who is so real to them, becomes nothing in their consciousness. As their text-book says, "One infinite God, good, unifies men and nations; constitutes the brotherhood of man; ends wars; fulfils the Scripture, 'Love thy neighbor as thyself;' annihilates pagan and Christian idolatry,—whatever is wrong in social, civil, criminal, political, and religious codes; equalizes the sexes; annuls the curse on man, and leaves nothing that can sin, suffer, be punished or destroyed" [Science and Health, p. 340].
These points are enough to show the superiority of Christian Science as a spiritual commentary on the Bible and as a guide into the truth as it is in Christ Jesus. Yet it is simply what the church holds theoretically, without, however, applying to conduct the logical conclusions drawn from its theology. The church has failed to appreciate Christian Science because it does not care to find out if these things be true, and catches up incorrect and partial expositions of it and accepts as true claims of callow enthusiasts whose healing too often is rather a mental massage and thought manipulation than the working of God as Truth. Even when carefully studied, there are often confusion and repulsion because words which are symbols of material objects must be used to convey spiritual reality, and also because to see spiritual concepts requires spiritual perception. Back of all misunderstanding, however, is unmistakable evidence of what it is worth by what it has done for many hundreds of thousands in saving them from sin, shame, poverty, sickness, and despair, which the churches of which they were members could neither do nor show them how to have it done.
It stands related to Protestantism somewhat as the primitive church to the Jewish religion. Against materialism it is the most powerful protest ever known, destructive of it by its constructive life as spiritual only and expressive of absolute being. Against caste and exclusive selfishness it is building up a democracy of those who are members one of another and all equal as children of God. A million and more, all laymen, who have come out of slavery to the false, are fighting an inspiring campaign to abolish the whole body of sin, poverty, disease, and death.
In its results it is proportionally more successful in healing than medical science, and in spiritual salvation than the church. Against that type of socialism whose slogan is "No God, No Master," it presents the true conception of God, unlike the one the church has so long taught, as a Being so real and attractive as to compel adoration. Against "No Master" it so presents Christ Jesus as the one Master that when these wild protestants against the social order curse the church, they hurrah for Jesus and call him Master. It seems to be the only power in religion to retard and return the tide that is setting away from God and the church, by revealing the God whom they in heart ignorantly worship and whom on their lower plane they desire but see not.
