ALWAYS the appeal of Christian Science is to right reasoning and not to emotional ecstasy. Many an earnest Christian Scientist of today was at first prejudiced against what he had thought Christian Science to be, mainly because he had misconceived of it as merely a matter of thinking or saying that nothing is the trouble, even when one seems to be suffering. Sooner or later, however, every sincere seeker begins to comprehend the truth of what Mrs. Eddy tells us on page 123 of Science and Health, that "divine Science, rising above physical theories, excludes matter, resolves things into thoughts, and replaces the objects of material sense with spiritual ideas." Then prejudice disappears in the midst of rejoicing and healing.
Christian Science rises above physical theories because it reasons about causation and not about effects only. To illustrate how physical theories deal entirely with effects, let us suppose that a man has indigestion, which a doctor has declared to be caused by a defective action of the gastric muscles. Would it not be logical to inquire what caused this defective action, and would not the inquiry show defective action to be in the last analysis not cause at all, but itself effect merely? Suppose then that the doctor should give as his opinion that this defective action was caused by imperfect action of the gastric nerve. Here again we should have to ask what caused the imperfect action. In this way we might, go on endlessly to nerve-cell and to nucleus with nerve-cell; but never by any such process of reasoning could we arrive at causation.
John Burroughs, the well-known naturalist, has recently said, "Resolve all the processes of organic nature into their mechanical and chemical elements, and you have not got the secret of living bodies any more than you have got the secret and meaning of a fine painting by resolving it into its original pigments and oils, or of a poem by cutting up the words into the letters of which it is composed." The truth is, of course, that the so-called mechanical and chemical elements do not constitute so-called human consciousness; they are but the effects of this consciousness. On page 379 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy points out that "the Christian Scientist finds only effects, where the ordinary physician looks for causes." Muscles, nerves, and cells are just as much the effects or expressions of the human, mortal mind as are the painting and the poem.
