PANDITA RAMABAI ON CHRISTIAN SCIENCE.
PANDITA RAMABAI is well known to every friend of Indian missions. She was born and reared in India in the religion of Buddha. A few years ago she visited America, and came in contact with Christian Science. This is what she said of that cult, as told in the record of Christian Work :— On my arrival in New York I was told that a new philosophy was being taught in the United States, and had already many disciples. The philosophy was called Christian Science, and when I asked what its teaching was I recognized it as being the same philosophy that has been taught among my people for four thousand years. It has ruined millions of lives and caused immeasurable suffering and sorrow in my land, for it is based on selfishness, and knows no sympathy or compassion. But what shocked me most has been the report that there are women in America who are not deceived by the name of Christian Science, but are confessedly studying and adopting the philosophy of the Hindus. As I was born and educated in the philosophy, having taken my degree of Pandita in it, I am acquainted with both its literature and its influence upon my people; and I want to witness to its degradation. The "grandeur and beauty" of that philosophy must be judged by its fruits. You are a people of feeling. Everything is real. You feel that when other people are starving you ought to give them something to eat, but out in India they do not feel that. Men do not feel any sympathy for others. . . . In our late famine our philosophers felt no compassion for sufferers, and did not help the needy. For why should they help when they claimed the suffering was not real, neither were the dying children real? The first result, then, of the philosophy is the basest cruelty and selfishness, no compassion for sufferers, and supreme egotism.