History teaches us that there has at all times been an inclination amongst the holders of orthodox opinions to examine critically the views of those who have separated themselves from their communion. Unfortunately, this examination has usually been undertaken not in any desire for enlightenment, but purely for the purpose of repression. If any proof were needed of the truth of such a statement, it is staring the world in the face in the existence of the laws against heresy on the statute books of the nations. Gradually, of course, as humanity became more humane, the torturing of heretics gave place to the civil disabilities of dissent, and these in turn to the social pressure of bigotry and ignorance. Voltaire writing, in the early eighteenth century, his Letters on England, noted, with his usual cynical humor, the fact that "an Englishman, as one to whom freedom is natural, may go to heaven his own way." It is true that the Englishman, of the church liturgy, were he the "infidel, heretic, or Turk," could go to his own heaven without going to His Majesty's prison on the way, but it would have been interesting to have the opinion of the Dissenter, the Jew, or the Roman Catholic, as to the limits of freedom of thought permitted to him when that mirror of the moralities, George the Second, was Defender of the Faith in England.
George the Second has given place to George the Fifth. The disabilities of the Dissenters, the Jews, and the Roman Catholics, have been swept away. There is a Romanist Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Westminster, a Jewish Lord Chief Justice, and the ministers of the Free Churches have been bidden to grace the cathedral pulpit. But human reason continues to ebb and flow with the regularity of the tides. Having released its neck from the yoke of theology, it hastens to place it beneath that of medicine. For the thirty-nine articles it has substituted the catalogue of infectious diseases, in place of the Test Act it enacts the Vaccination Act, and whilst admitting that the dogma of the fall of man or of transubstantiation may be open to question, repudiates all heresy with respect to serums. But here comes in the difficulty, the difficulty of all efforts to legislate illogically. If a man is to be permitted to exercise freedom of opinion as to the Pauline doctrine of the fall, or the New Testament teaching as to the Last Supper, why is he to be deprived of freedom of opinion as to the teaching of the Bible on the question of physical healing?
It is just here that the drafters of the report of the recent Lambeth Conference have made their fundamental error, which has vitiated every one of their conclusions with respect to Christian Science. The archbishop and thirty-one bishops, who examined the subject and issued the report, have been guilty of attempting to criticize demonstrable Science by concentrating attention on its theory and ignoring its practice. Not so did the committee which sat in the deanery at Westminster, under the presidency of the Dean, in the summer of 1914. It recognized the hopelessness of attempting to divorce cause from effect. Made up in equal proportions of the leading clergy and most eminent doctors of the day, it asked for and obtained evidence of Christian Science healing equally with an explanation of its teaching on definite questions of its own selection, and so never transgressed against Jesus' declaration that a tree must be known by its fruit.
