It is not difficult, when one considers the cause of Christian Science as a whole, to understand why this movement has been the object of continued persecution from opposing material systems, theories, falsely styled sciences, and scholastic theology. To these material modes of human thought Christian Science seems tremendously iconoclastic, and mortal mind ever resists what it recognizes as its destroyer.
Christian Scientists as a body, however, holding as they do a proved faith in the righteousness of this cause, have proceeded triumphantly with a very considerable degree of the prescribed rejoicing under persecution "for righteousness' sake." They understand that because Christian Science conforms to the absolute standard of law and justice God will take care of this cause, and knowing that "the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are open unto their prayers," they do not as a body vitiate thought by condemnation of opponents; for resistance to Truth is understood always to be blind and impotent material sense, never person.
Curiously enough the human mind, which after its first grasp of Christian Science takes this sane and scientific general view of persecution "for righteousness' sake," frequently grows vague when it turns from the general to the individual problem, and calls that persecution which is in fact only the inevitable result of its own failure to grasp the truth. A needed rebuke or a just correction of error cannot rightly be called persecution for one's righteousness. The power of Christian Science is daily demonstrated to be the power of God, and is therefore righteous; that is, it absolutely conforms to spiritual law and justice. But to say and to understand that Christian Science is persecuted by the material sense which hates spirituality, is a very different thing from claiming as an individual Scientist that when one suffers as a result of the errors of belief which he has himself not yet overcome, he is being persecuted for righteousness' sake.
