O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding
profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely
so called.--_1 Tim. 6, 20._
Everything in this world is liable to be spoiled. There is nothing
safe against the doings of corruption. The holiest things are often
perverted, the richest flowers blasted in their bud. Man himself, as
the Psalmist tells us, was made but a little lower than the angels,
but his glory was soon tarnished, and he frequently sinks a little
lower than the brute. There is none, though he appear as a veritable
saint among men, who is beyond the reach of danger. And it is so
also with religion.
Beautiful as is religion, and pure as it is, coming from the mind
and bosom of God, it is liable to be spoiled in the hands and hearts
of its professors. Such at least is the teaching of the text and
the testimony of experience. Just like the crystal mountain stream
in its course from the virgin spring down to the ocean gathers some
of the unclean and filthy deposits of the shores it washes, so the
waves of religion, in flowing through many lands and hearts, have
taken up some of their noxious and poisonous ingredients; while
purifying and refreshing the earth, the noble river contracts some
of its corruptions. The Jews, for instance, had a pure religion,
communicated to them by the patriarchs and prophets, but heathenish
elements were continually mingling with it. Moloch and other hideous
idols would now and then stand in the very presence of Jehovah's
temple, and the priests of Baal oft took the place of the sons of
Aaron. When Christ came, the Jewish religion was exceedingly tainted
and corrupted with Gentileism and other defiling influences. The
Christian religion in its turn has fared no better, starting out
on the pure basis of its divine Master's directions; but it has
been subject to the same influences. It was given to the world as
a plain, simple system. But when kings and emperors began to take
it into favor, magnificent outward ceremonies were instituted,
privileged orders were appointed; bishops and other high authorities
were set up, claiming extraordinary power, and at last what started
as Christianity became little more than baptized heathenism. Masses,
penances, and confessionals took the stead of Christ and His
righteousness. In place of the old heathen gods were placed patron
saints. Venus of the Greeks became Mary of the Christians. The true
glory of the Church was gone, until God in His mercy turned back the
tide to His own Revelation and Book, the Holy Bible. That was in the
days of the Lutheran Reformation. But that did not settle matters;
the soil of misguided religion and of man's perverted opinion has
been defiling, and is still defiling, its pure and holy waters. It
need not be. Christianity is as simple as simplicity can be, its
teaching is as clear as is the sunlight in its noonday radiancy;
but, of course, it must be guarded, protected against corruption on
the part of man's delirious and sickly reason.
This is the caution St. Paul makes in our text to his beloved
pupil Timothy, when he directs him: "O Timothy, keep that which is
committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and
oppositions of science falsely so called, which some professing
have erred concerning the faith." There are two classes of science
falsely so called that have erred concerning the faith. The one
is the worldly science, and the other the Christian Science, and
concerning both classes I would ask for your most careful attention.
When speaking of science, it must be observed at the outset that
true science and the Revelation of God are not at variance. How
can they be? The Book of Nature and the Book of Religion have been
written by one and the same Hand, and cannot contradict each other.
What man by investigation can find out in nature cannot be of a
character to make him doubt or deny the truthfulness of religion
as laid down in the Bible. But this is what some of the men of
supposed higher learning are doing. They look askance at religion.
They shake their wise heads, and, putting on their eye-glasses,
superciliously state that the Bible is not what people think it is.
They are willing to admit that it is a book of much good history,
a book of sublime poetry, a book of excellent moral precepts, a
book which admirably describes human nature, a book from which all
men may gather a great deal of practical wisdom and comforting
promise, but many of its texts are spurious or faulty, it is not
altogether up to date in their opinion. The geologist has bored
into the earth, and found that the various compositions must make
it much older than Moses seems to say. The astronomer has put his
telescope into the heavens and finding our planet, the earth, the
smallest among heavenly bodies, considers it too insignificant to
be the object of all that divine concern the Bible speaks about.
The anatomist has examined the skulls of dead men, and comparing
the one with the other, questions whether they have all proceeded
from one human pair. The natural historian has never found a race of
snakes with power of speech, and so he puts down the account of the
serpent in Eden as a myth. The people of the earth speak hundreds
of languages, and hence it must be a mere dream that there was once
a time when "the whole earth was of one language and one speech."
Miracles, they say, are so contrary to the general experience of
mankind that they must be rejected as falsehood and fiction, and
thus might we continue to give the objections of these wiseacres,
called scientists, who are looked up to with undisguised admiration
by numbers. It would lead us too far, though nothing might afford
us greater pleasure to examine these objections in their true
light.--We will only ask, How do these wise people know what length
of time it took the almighty God to form the various strata which
compose the crust of the earth? How can they tell that this world of
ours is too small to engage Jehovah so deeply for its welfare? How
can they prove that the human race and language do not extend back
to one common stock? How dare they deny the credibility of miracles
in the face of the many wonders which are spread about them every
day, and appear every season in their sight? What authority have
they for their high-sounding, but hollow assertions? They think
themselves wise, but in fact they are but babes in these matters,
and those who follow them are their senseless dupes.
The truth is that with all the advances of knowledge which have so
wonderfully marked the last three hundred years, searching heaven
and earth and sea, knocking at every door and gathering wisdom from
every source, there has not come to light one truth to contradict
these holy records, or to require the relinquishment of one word in
all the great volume of God. Only a few instances to prove what I
state. It has been but a few years since Newton laid open the laws
of gravitation, and yet the Scriptures spoke of the earth being hung
"upon nothing," as if familiar with the whole subject, before human
science had begun to form even the feeblest guesses in the case.
Again, take the theory of wind currents, and of the circulation of
the blood, why, read the 1st, 6th and 12th chapters of Ecclesiastes,
and observe where Solomon describes it at least 2,500 years ago.
And so in every case. You may lack understanding or research, you
may fail to grasp its truth, by reason of its being too wonderful
to you, but as far as being false and spurious, let no man dare to
raise that charge against God's religion and Book. Our wisdom, at
best, is only fragmentary, as St. Paul says, "We know only in part."
No man, not even a scientist, is the personification of all wisdom,
and ought not so consider himself. Let every man be a liar, but
never accuse God's truthfulness. Avoid such, as St. Paul says in our
text, as being profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science
falsely so called.
This, then, as much as worldly science is concerned, and now let us
turn to the other species which calls itself Christian Science, but
which is neither Christian nor Science,--not Christian, because it
has erred from the faith, as our text puts it, and not a science,
because, to quote our text again, it is falsely so called. It might
be well to approach the matter more closely. In the first place, it
must be noted that Christian Science is nothing new; it is, to be
candid, a rehash of what is termed in Church History, Gnosticism. In
the early Christian Church, about the year 200 after Christ, there
arose certain heretics, Montanus and his prophetesses Maximilla and
Priscilla, who advocated theories and things similar to those in our
days advanced with so much zealousness by the late Mrs. Mary Baker
G. Eddy, the founder and high priestess of the Church of Christian
Scientists. These heretical views referred to also found adherents
in the early Church, so that the excellent Bishop Irenaeus, of
Lyons, wrote a book against them called, "The Refutation of
Christian Science falsely so called." Mrs. Eddy very deftly
succeeded in bolstering up these ancient opinions, and launched
them forth in the various editions of her book called "Science and
Health, with a Key to the Scriptures." I have carefully gone over
that book, and I confess I am overwhelmed with shame to think that
any one who lays claim to Christianity or to well-balanced reason
can earnestly believe such matter. To mention only a few of her
doctrines:--The Bible says 1 John 5, 7: "There are three that bear
record in heaven: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and these
three are one." Mrs. Eddy says: "The theory of three persons in the
Godhead reminds us of heathen gods." In other words, she stamps the
Christian doctrine of the Trinity as heathenish. The Bible says,
Rom. 5, 12: "By one man sin entered into the world and death by
sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned."
Mrs. Eddy calls this an "illusion," purely imaginary; there is no
such thing as death. Naturally, then, in line with this, she also
rejects Christ's redeeming us from sin, stating that the time is
not distant when these common views about Christ's redemption will
undergo a great change. In other words, while she mentions Christ's
name with seemingly the greatest reverence in her book, she calls
Him a fraud and deceiver, because the Bible tells us in just these
words that Christ came to save His people from their sins, came
to destroy the works of the devil, came to redeem them that were
under the Law. But Mrs. Eddy spurns the existence of a personal
devil, denies the existence of sin, and rejects redemption. Such
passages as 1 John 1, 7: "The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son,
cleanseth us from all sin," are "hideous" to her. Her entire system
is nothing else than unchristian bosh. I say "unchristian" because,
on closer investigation, there is not a single particle of Christian
doctrine and belief that she does not openly or indirectly at least
overthrow. It is true, she claims "faith in the Bible"; the title
of her book is, "Science and Health, with a Key to the Scriptures,"
but it is a key that binds, but does not unlock. Her comment to the
very first verse of the Scripture: "In the beginning God created
the heaven and the earth," is this: "This creation consists in
the developing of spiritual ideas and their identities, which are
grasped and reflected by the unending Spirit." That may be Mrs.
Eddy's creation of the world, but it certainly was not the creation
which the first chapter of Genesis tells us about.
But let us go on to the second chapter of the Bible. This does not
suit Mrs. Eddy, as she expressly states it is diametrically opposed
to scientific truth, and "inspired by falsehood and error," and in
consequence she rejects the second chapter of Genesis entirely. We
could go on at this rate, but enough has been shown to characterize
Mrs. Eddy's "Key to the Scriptures." And alas! that men should be
carried away with such barefaced craftiness and such thick-coated
and consummate falsehood! Oh, may it teach us to love to study our
Bible!
But there is still another phase of Christian Science of which we
must speak, would we do it justice, and that is the healing phase.
Mrs. Eddy claims that she has restored the sick and brought back
the dying to life. "Science and Health" and our community have been
repeatedly agitated by specimens of this healing ability. It is
well known to every one that Christian Science in its treatment of
disease starts from the fundamental theory that there is no sickness
and disease, as it says in their text-book, "Science and Health":
"You call it neuralgia; this is all delusion, imagination. You
expose your body to a certain temperature, and your delusion says
that you catch a cold or get catarrh. But such is not the case; it
is only the effect of your imagination." The consequence of this
fallacy is that no medical remedies are resorted to; in fact, to a
Christian Scientist ignorance of medicine is bliss. Mrs. Eddy warns
against a knowledge of medicine as a hindrance to learning her
system.
Stopping here for a moment to show the unscripturalness of all this,
I would but briefly call your attention to such passages as Is. 38
and 2 Kings 20, where we read: "And Isaiah, the prophet of the Lord,
said to Hezekiah the King, Let them take a lump of figs and lay it
for a plaster upon the boil, and he shall recover." Or, turning to
an instance from the New Testament, St. Paul the Apostle writes in 1
Tim. 5, 23 to his afflicted pupil: "Drink no longer water, but use
a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities,"
thus suggesting a medicinal tonic or medicine. Our Lord approved of
physicians when He said: "They that be whole," that is, healthy,
"need not a physician," which evidently implies that the sick do
need a physician, and we know from Col. 4, 14 that there was a
physician among the first disciples of the Christian Church, and
that was none other than the man who wrote the third and the fifth
book in the New Testament, namely, St. Luke. It says in Col. 4, 14:
"Luke, the beloved physician, greets you." And moreover, when we
read that in the days of His flesh the sick and the palsied and the
lame, and those afflicted otherwise, came to Jesus and He healed
them, does not Christian Science, denying that there is no sickness,
no palsy, and no disease, brand our Lord as a liar and a fraud? God
protect us from such abomination!
But let us come to the final question: By what power or remedy
does Christian Science heal, or, rather, claim to heal? Answer:
By denying the existence of matter, of sickness, of death, and
by seeking to give the mind complete mastery. Just imagine it is
not so! Prayer is employed, but Mrs. Eddy does not attach as much
importance to that as some of her followers, and from what we have
heard, such prayer is not the prayer of faith, for she has far erred
from God and the faith. God certainly does not answer such vain and
profane babbling of lips that speak falsehood and lies. The whole
Christian Science is a blustering, high-strung delusion. St. Paul
gives a true characterization of it 2 Thess. 2, 9: "It is after the
working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders and
with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish."
God grant that we may "avoid profane and vain babblings and
oppositions of science falsely so called." With our hearts firmly
grounded in the simple truth as it is in Jesus, and laid down in the
Volume before us, let us hold fast through God's grace what we have.
It is the power, the only power, unto salvation. Amen.