IN a few states of the United States, the practice of Christian Science is not recognized as completely legal. Christian Scientists are indirectly forbidden to charge for their work. Thus, they are indirectly forbidden to engage in the practice of their religion as a vocation. In these states, the medical profession has obtained the enactment of a law so framed that any service for health, not rendered gratuitously, is regarded as the practice of medicine and surgery, for which a license, based on study of this material system, is required. It is plain that such a device is the opposite of a just law: it is a mere artifice calculated to confer a monopoly on the medical profession. The only purpose of forbidding Christian Science practitioners to collect compensation is to keep Christian Scientists, especially men, from devoting their lives to the practice of their religion. In effect, such an enactment invades not only the rights of Christian Scientists, but also the rights of all people, and such a subterfuge does the further harm of inculcating general disrespect for law. Surely, no friend of good government should be on the side of such results.
The Founder of the Christian religion commanded his followers to heal the sick. See Matthew 10:5-10, 28:16-20; Mark 16:14-18; Luke 10:1-9; John 14:12. He also taught that "the labourer is worthy of his hire;" and he said this to his disciples when sending them forth to heal the sick. See Matthew 10:5-15; Luke 10:1-9. This Christian precept has become a legal rule: for any accepted service, not intended to be gratuitous, the law of every jurisdiction implies an obligation to pay fair and just compensation.
There is no reason for anybody's confusing the practice of Christian Science with the practice of medicine or any material system. The difference is both comprehensible and substantial. Everybody admits that the so-called human consciousness is partly false and partly true. This admission is required by universal experience. How is false consciousness to be distinguished from true? This question is vital to human welfare. Christian Science answers it by declaring the Principle of true consciousness, by declaring the source and substance of true thought. This religion and Science declares that absolute consciousness, true thought, is derived from God, from the divine Mind, the infinite Soul. This teaching declares that every item of consciousness, every instance of thought, can be tested by its correspondence to the divine nature, by its reflection of divine Life, Truth, and Love. In particular, Christian Science reiterates the test furnished by Christ Jesus when he said, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit" (John 3:6). In short, the false element in human consciousness is material; it is material sense. True consciousness is spiritual; it is spiritual sense.
The distinction just stated is of the utmost practical value. For one application, it is essential to the cure of disease and to the maintenance of health. According to this teaching, disease can be resolved into a condition of erroneous thought; it can be reduced to an image of material sense. Thus it can be cured or prevented by spiritual understanding, by knowing the truth of being which makes one free. It can be cured by the power of absolute Mind acting through spiritual law as invoked by prayer. Mrs. Eddy has said: "We classify disease as error, which nothing but Truth or Mind can heal, and this Mind must be divine, not human. ... In order to heal by Science, you must not be ignorant of the moral and spiritual demands of Science nor disobey them" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 483). In short, the practice of Christian Science is at once mental and spiritual; it is essentially and exclusively the practice of the Christian religion. Surely, there is no good reason why such a practice should be the subject of legal restriction.
Many judicial decisions and many statements by men in public positions could be cited in support of this view, and a few will be. Thus, the Kentucky Court of Appeals, when refusing to put a monopolistic construction on the Kentucky medical act, reasoned that "the effect of the act would be not to protect the people of this state from the unscientific practice of medicine, but to deny to the sick all ministrations not gratuitous, unless by registered physicians. Thus construed, the act would be for the protection rather of the doctors of the state than the people" (Nelson v. State Board of Health, 22 Ky. Law Rep. 438, 50 L. R. A. 383). Likewise, the North Carolina Supreme Court has said, "This is a free country, and any man has a right to be treated by any system he chooses" (State v. Biggs, 133 N. C. Rep. 729, 64 L.R.A. 139).
The Georgia Court of Appeals has observed that requiring a Christian Science practitioner to be examined by a medical board would be "absurd" (Bennett v. Ware, 4 Ga. App. Rep.293, 61 S. E. Rep.546). The California Supreme Court has spoken as follows: "To assume that treatment by prayer is less efficacious or more dangerous or harmful to the subject of the prayer by reason of the fact that the supplicant has failed to devote two hundred and sixty hours to manipulative and mechanical therapy, or has neglected to study elementary bacteriology for a period of sixty hours, does violence to all legal or religious teaching" (People v. Jordan,172 Cal. Rep.391,156 Pac. Rep.451). Other courts which have found good reasons why the practice of religion should not be confused with and regulated as the practice of medicine include the Kansas Supreme Court, the New York Court of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court. See State v. Wilcox, 64 Kan. Rep.789; People v. Cole,219 N. Y. Rep. 98; People v. Vogelgesang, 221 N. Y. Rep.290; Crane v. Johnson, 242 U. S. Rep. 339.
Fair-minded and far-seeing people respect their neighbors' faith in God; they agree to the guaranty in American constitutions of the free exercise of religion; they are opposed to injustice disguised as law. Reduced to the shortest statement, these are the points presented by the medical law which is the subject of this writing.
