A "DREADFUL SCOURGE."

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 19, 1902

A "DREADFUL SCOURGE."

THE following is from an article by James R. Day, LL.D., chancellor of Syracuse University, printed in the Christian Advocate of December 26. It relates the story of an esteemed teacher of music in the university who fell ill, went to Boston for "Christian Science" treatment, returned and took "absent treatment," growing worse all the time, from a malady which ordinarily readily yields to rational treatment. Under the strongest solicitation from Dr. Day and others, the lady finally yielded and permitted a physician to examine her. But she was then past help. After telling his story, Dr. Day thus moralizes:—

What more dreadful scourge has come upon the Christian Church in modern times? It works its delusion and does its fatal mischief by incorporating an element of true faith. But it is the faith without works, which is dead and causes death. Its logical conclusions do away with sin, the atonement, and law and forgiveness. It destroys soul and body if they depend upon it.

Why men who accept the doctrine of Christian Science, with its view of matter, and cause immediate and mediate, do not cease to eat to sustain the body, and why they change from summer to winter raiment, and do everything else of business and labor as others do to sustain life, one can not imagine. They are condemned out of their own practises.

The pseudo Christian Scientist has no monopoly of faith, of supreme faith, or faith applied to healing the sick. We teach rest of faith. One may believe for himself in sickness and trouble all he will, and God will help his unbelief. He need not run off to Christian Science for the privilege. But he will discriminate between faith and fanaticism and between belief and presumption. Ignorance confuses the laws of nature and of faith, and deceives the elect with great swelling words of "science, falsely so called."

We charge the death of Unni Lund upon Christian Science. The Scientists will deny it. They will deny that she was one of them, that she took their treatment, or they will say that she was cured, but died as the result of taking a physician at the last moment. The fact that there were unmistakable physical evidences that she was beyond all hope at that moment will, of course, not count with them. If she had recovered, they would claim her as a signal and wonderful vindication of divine cure without interposition of doctor or medicine. Therefore no convincing arguments can be carried on with them. But our people should not be deceived. All that Christian Science has that weary souls long for or need is in the faith and teaching of evangelical Christianity, without the vagaries that confuse the mind, hallucinate the faith, or destroy the body.

All that there is in Christian Science that can be commended, all that calms the hysterical temperament that appears to be organic cure, all that helps to any mastery of the mind over the physical conditions, all that removes or prevents hypochondria or delusions with regard to bodily ailments, has been in the world in "the faith of our fathers" since the days when Christ came until this present. It is not new and peculiar to Christian Science. And this whole and unperverted faith has been in perfect harmony with natural law and consistent with physical means for man's sustenance, and the remedy of his bodily ills according to a manifestly divine plan.