Christian Science practice is the application of its philosophy and
theology to bodily healing. This is really the end toward which the
whole system is directed. "Science and Health" is an exposition of Mrs.
Eddy's system as a healing force. Her philosophy and theology are
incidental, or--if that is not a fair statement--they both condition and
are conditioned by her system of healing. There is hardly a page in her
book without its reference to sickness and health. Her statements are
consequently always involved and one needs to stand quite back from them
to follow their outline. Here, as elsewhere, one may read deeply and
indirectly between the lines attitudes and beliefs against which she is
reacting. Her reactions against the environment of her girlhood and
early womanhood affect her point of view so distinctly that without the
recognition of this a good deal of what she says is a puzzle without a
key.
_Christian Science the Application of Philosophy and Theology to Bodily
Healing_
She had been taught, among other things, that sickness is a punishment
for sin. One may safely assume this for the theology of her formative
period fell back upon this general statement in its attempt to reconcile
individual suffering and special providence. One ought not justly to say
that Mrs. Eddy ever categorically affirms that she had been taught this,
or as categorically denies the truth of it, but there are statements--as
for example page 366--which seem to imply that she is arguing against
this and directing her practitioners how to meet and overcome it. This
perhaps accounts for the rather difficult and wavering treatment of sin
and sickness in a connection where logically sickness alone should be
considered.
Mrs. Eddy would not naturally have thus associated sin and sickness had
they not been associated for her in earlier teaching and yet, as has
been said, all this is implicit rather than explicit. The key to a great
deal in "Science and Health" is not in what the author says, but in the
reader's power to discover behind her statements what she is "writing
down." Her system is both denial and affirmation. In the popular
interpretation of it quite as much is made of denial and the recognition
of error as of its more positive aspects, but in the book there is a
pretty constant interweaving of both the denial of evil and the
affirmation of well-being.
There is a sound element of wisdom in many of her injunctions, but more
needed perhaps fifty years ago than now. We must remember constantly
that Mrs. Eddy is writing against the backgrounds of a somber theology,
a medical practice which relied very greatly on the use of drugs which
was at the same time limited in its materia medica and too largely
experimental in its practice. She was writing before the day of the
trained nurse with her efficient poise. The atmosphere of a sick room is
not naturally cheerful and generally both the medical procedure and the
spiritual comfort of the sick room of the fifties and sixties did very
little to lighten depression. When, therefore, Mrs. Eddy urges, as she
does, an atmosphere of confidence and sympathy she is directly in the
right direction.
_Looseness of Christian Science Diagnosis_
As we pass beyond these things which are now commonplace, what she says
is not so simple. It is difficult to say how far the healing which
attends upon Christian Science is in her thought the result of Divine
Power immediately in exercise, and how far it is the outcome of
disciplines due to the acceptance of her theology and philosophy. It is
hard also to distinguish between the part the healer plays and the
contribution of the subject. There is no logical place in Christian
Science practice for physical diagnosis. "Physicians examine the pulse,
tongue, lungs, to discover the condition of matter, when in fact all is
Mind. The body is the substratum of mortal mind, and this so-called mind
must finally yield to the mandate of immortal Mind" (page 370).
The result of this in practice is that the Christian Science healer
accepts either the diagnosis of the medical schools, reported
second-hand or else the patient's own statement of his condition.
Needless to say there is room for very great looseness of diagnosis in
such a practice as this. The actuality of sickness must be recognized
neither directly nor indirectly. The sickness must not be thought or
talked. Here also, as far as the patient is concerned, is a procedure of
undebated value. It all comes back, as we shall see presently, to
suggestion, but any procedure which frees the patient from depressing
suggestion and substitutes therefor an encouraging suggestion is in the
right direction. At the same time those who are not Christian Scientists
would rather stubbornly believe that somebody must recognize the fact of
sickness or else we cannot begin to set in action the machinery for
curing it, even if that machinery be Christian Science itself, and we do
not change this rather stubborn fact by covering sickness with the blank
designation Error. Even the error is real for the time being.[56]
[Footnote 56: The writer once received an unexpected sidelight on the
practice of the Christian Science healer in this connection. He once
enjoyed the friendship of a Christian Science healer with whom he often
played golf. He called this healer up one morning to make an
appointment. His voice was not recognized over the telephone and he was
mistaken for a patient. The reply came back in professional tones--"And
what error are you suffering from this morning?" When he answered that
his own particular error was his persuasion that he could play golf the
telephone atmosphere was immediately changed.]
The results of fear are constantly dwelt upon and this too is in the
right direction. Much is made of the creative power of mind in that it
imparts purity, health and beauty (page 371). When Mrs. Eddy says on
page 373 that disease is expressed not so much by the lips as in the
functions of the body she is making one of those concessions to common
sense which she makes over and over again, but when she attempts to
explain how erroneous or--as one may venture to call it--diseased belief
expresses itself in bodily function one is reminded of Quimby.
Temperature, for example, is wholly mental. Mrs. Eddy's reason for
believing this is apparently because "the body when bereft of mortal
mind at first cools and afterward it is resolved into its primitive
mortal elements." "Mortal Mind produces animal heat and then expels it
through the abandonment of a belief or increases it to the point of
self-destruction" (page 374). Fever is a mental state. Destroy fear and
you end fever.
In all this there is a profound ignorance of the real causes of fever
which helps us to understand the marked deficiencies of the whole
system. There is nowhere any recognition of the body as an instrument
for the transformation and conservation and release of energy real as a
dynamo. There is nowhere any recognition of the commonplaces of modern
medical science in the tracing of germ infections. True enough, medical
science had hardly more than begun when "Science and Health" was first
written to redefine fevers in terms of germ infection and the consequent
disorganization of the balance of physical functionings, and the
oxidation of waste materials real as fire on a hearth, but that is no
reason why such ignorance should be continued from generation to
generation.
_The Power of Mental Environment_
In general, Christian Science practice as indicated in "Science and
Health" is a strange mingling of the true, the assumed and the false;
its assumptions are backed up by selected illustrations and all that
challenges it is ignored. Disease is unreal because Mind is not sick and
matter cannot be (page 393). But Mind is "the only I, or Us, divine
Principle, ... Life, Truth, Love; Deity, which outlines but is not
outlined" (page 591). In other words Mind is an ideal affirmation which
Mrs. Eddy assumes to underlie human experience and possibly to reveal
itself through human experience, and it certainly does not follow that
while an ideal affirmation is not sick, a human being involved in the
necessary relationships of our present material existence may not be.
Mrs. Eddy never clearly distinguishes between what a speculative mind
may affirm and actual experience report. Her dialectic is a constant
wrestling with reality in a range of statement which involves her in
many contradictions. She recognizes what she denies and denies what she
recognizes and, in a lawyer's phrase, constantly changes the venue.
But through and behind it all is an intelligible method. Confidence is
to be reestablished, fear is allayed, the sufferer from error led to
commit himself to healing forces. These healing forces are not
consistently defined. Sometimes they are the "power of the mind to
sustain the body" (page 417); sometimes "the power of Christian Science"
(page 412), or "the power of Truth" (page 420) or divine Spirit, or her
book itself. "Continue to read and the book will become the physician,
allaying the tremor which Truth often brings to error when destroying
it" (page 422).
Mrs. Eddy sometimes anticipates in a vague way the reaction of thought
and emotion upon physiological function to which Cannon has given such
careful attention, but her definite statements are strangely inadequate.
"What I term _chemicalization_ is the upheaval produced when immortal
Truth is destroying erroneous mortal belief. Mental chemicalization
brings sin and sickness to the surface, forcing impurities to pass away,
as is the case with a fermenting fluid" (page 401).[57] She recognizes
the limits of Christian Science practice when she advises her followers
to leave surgery and the adjustment of broken bones and dislocations to
the fingers of a surgeon until the advancing age admits the efficacy and
supremacy of mind (page 401).
[Footnote 57: Compare "The Quimby Manuscripts," p. 118.]
Great care is to be taken as to the patient's mental environment. Mrs.
Eddy's constant emphasis upon this explains the excessive separatist
nature of Christian Science. More than almost any other of its cults it
separates its followers from those who do not belong to the cult. They
cannot, naturally, attend churches in which the reality of disease is
recognized; they must have their own nurses as well as their own
healers; in certain regions they must confine their reading to their own
literature; their children must be educated, on their religious side, in
their own cult schools and they cannot consistently associate themselves
with remedial movements which assume another philosophy as their basis.
It is difficult for a detached observer to see how a consistent
Christian Scientist reconciles the general conclusions of a modern
scientific education with the presuppositions of his cult. That he does
this is one more testimony to a power which indeed is exercised in many
other fields than the field of Christian Science to keep in the
practical conduct of life many of our governing conceptions in different
and apparently water-tight compartments.
_Christian Science Defines Disease as a Belief Which if Treated as an
Error Will Disappear_
The answer to such a line of criticism is, of course, in the familiar
Christian Science phrase that perfect demonstration has not yet been
achieved in the regions in which the Christian Scientist appears to be
inconsistent. But beyond this is the rather stubborn fact that in some
of these regions demonstration never will be realized; Christian Science
is confined to the field in which suggestion may operate. Mrs. Eddy is
most specific about diseases, concerning which the medical practice of
her time was most concerned and in the light of later medical science
most ignorant--fever, inflammation, indigestion, scrofula, consumption
and the like. These are all beliefs and if treated as error they will
disappear. Even death is a dream which mind can master, though this
doubtless is only Mrs. Eddy's way of affirming immortality. She hardly
means to say that death is not a fact which practically has to be
reckoned with in ways more final and unescapable than any other fact in
life. As Dr. Campbell Morgan once said: "If you have the misfortune to
imagine that you are dead, they will bury you."
Mrs. Eddy concludes her chapter on Christian Science Practice with an
allegory which she calls a mental court case, the suggestion of which is
to be found in one of the Quimby manuscripts.[58] Since this manuscript
is dated 1862 it anticipates Mrs. Eddy by almost thirteen years. The
setting is like the trial of Faithful and Christian in the town of
Vanity Fair as recorded in Bunyan's "Pilgrim Progress." Doubtless
memories of Mrs. Eddy's reading of that deathless allegory are
reproduced in this particular passage which the author is inclined to
believe she wrote with more pleasure than anything else ever turned out
by her too facile pen. Personal Sense is the plaintiff, Mortal Man the
defendant, False Belief the attorney for Personal Sense, Mortal Minds,
Materia Medica, Anatomy, Physiology, Hypnotism, Envy, Greed and
Ingratitude constitute the Jury. The court room is filled with
interested spectators and Judge Medicine is on the bench. The case is
going strongly against the prisoner and he is likely to expire on the
spot when Christian Science is allowed to speak as counsel for the
defense. He appeals in the name of the plaintiff to the Supreme Court of
Spirit, secures from the jury of the spiritual senses a verdict of "Not
Guilty" and with the dismissal of the case the chapter on Christian
Science Practice ends.
[Footnote 58: "The Quimby Manuscripts," p. 172.]
_Christian Science Has a Rich Field to Work_
Now what can finally be said of the whole matter? In general, two
things. Recognizing the force and reality of psycho-therapy Christian
Science gets its power as a healing system from the great number of
people who are open to its appeal and the shrewd combination of elements
in the appeal itself. In spite of our great advance in medical knowledge
and practice and in spite of the results of an improved hygiene there
remains in society at large a very great deposit of physical ill-being
sometimes acute, sometimes chronic, sometimes clearly defined, sometimes
vague, badly treated cases, hopeless cases and a great reach of cases
which are due rather to disturbed mental and moral states than to
ascertainable physical causes. Illness has its border-land region as
well as thought and the border-land faiths make their foremost appeal to
those who, for one reason or another, live in border-land physical
states.
And, to repeat, the number of those who belong to this group is
unexpectedly large. Naturally such as these grasp at anything which
offers help; they supply to the manufacturer of cure-all drugs their
clientele; they fill printed pages with testimonials of marvellous cures
achieved where the regular medical faculty had been helpless; they crowd
about every faith healer; they are the comrades of the pilgrims to
Lourdes and Ste. Anne de Beaupre; they belong to the fellowship of those
who, in the Middle Ages, haunted shrines and sought out relics and asked
to be touched by kings. We discover their forebears in the pages of the
Gospels and as far back as any records go we see this long, pathetic
procession of the hopeless or the handicapped seeking help. And again
and again they get it, for we have also seen that, given faith enough
either in a saint or a shrine or a system, psycho-therapy with certain
subjects and in certain cases does heal. But this type of healing
depends upon no one philosophy or no single force except indeed those
obscure forces which are released by suggestion.
While this was being written certain evangelistic faith healers in the
city of Detroit were sending out broadsides of testimonials to their
healings, as definite in detail as the testimonials in "Science and
Health," or the _Christian Science Journal_, and yet the basal
principles by which these men have claimed to work are as different from
the basal principles of Christian Science as east is from west. While
this is being revised Coue, the apostle of suggestion according to the
Nancy school, is besieged in New York by those who have been led to hope
for healing through the success of his method. Whether the relic be true
or false does not matter if only the relic be believed in.
_One of the Most Strongly-Drawn Systems of Psycho-therapy Ever Offered_
Now Christian Science is one of the most strongly drawn
psycho-therapeutic agencies ever offered. Most faith healing systems
heretofore have depended upon some place, some thing, some healer. Here
is a system capable of the widest dissemination and dependent only upon
a book and its interpreters. It universalizes what has heretofore, for
one reason or another, been localized. It is shrewdly organized, as far
as propaganda goes, and effectively directed. It is widely advertised by
its friends--and its critics. Its temples, for beauty and dignity, put
to shame most Protestant churches. Its rituals combine in an unusual way
the simple and the dramatic. It is so fortunately situated as to be able
to keep finance--which is a trying element in Protestant Church life--in
the background. Its followers have that apostolic fervour which attaches
to movements sure of their divine commission and not yet much worn by
time. It possesses distinctly one of Sir Henry Jones' hall-marks of
religion. "It impassions the spirit of its disciples and adds
consequence to the things it sanctions or condemns."
It draws upon deeply established Christian reverences and faiths. It
secures for its authority the persistent but perplexed faith in the
Bible which the average Protestant inherits and for those who believe in
it the force of this authority is no wise weakened by the fact that by
every sound canon of Biblical interpretation it is illicit. Its very
dogmatism is an asset. It could not do its work if it were less sure.
The confusions of the systems which try the critically minded are a
contribution to the devout who find in them an added opportunity for
faith. Its experience meetings create enthusiasm and confidence. It is,
in short, more than any one of the movements we are here considering, a
clearly defined cult whose intensities, limitations and mystic
assurances all combine to produce among its disciples the temper most
favourable to suggestion and it locks up on its force as a system of
healing.
An accurate analysis of what it actually accomplishes would require an
immense and probably impossible labour--a knowledge of each case, an
accurate diagnosis when even for the trained diagnostician the thing is
difficult enough, and the following up of all reported cases. The
medical faculty would probably have done better to have taken such
movements as these more seriously and to have brought to them a trained
investigation which, except in the case of Lourdes, has never even been
attempted. Doubtless there is looseness and inconsistency in the whole
system. Almost any one who has had a practical observation of the
working of Christian Science has knowledge enough not only of looseness
and inconsistency but of what seems to the non-Christian Science mind
positive untruth. Something, however, must always be allowed here for
the way in which the mind acts under excitement and for the way in which
delusion deludes. All this combines to make any final judgment in this
region difficult, but there still remains, after all qualification, an
arresting solidity of achievement. Christian Science does work,
especially with the self-absorbed, the neurotic and those who have
needed, above all, for their physical deliverance, a new access to faith
and courage. Christian Science practitioners have also an unusual
opportunity in what may be called moral rehabilitation with physical
consequences. The physician has a better chance with the bodies of his
patients than with their souls; the minister a better chance with the
spiritual needs of his parishioners than with their bodies and habits;
the Christian Science practitioner to an unusual extent has the whole of
life under his control and it ought in all fairness to be conceded that
this power is helpfully employed.
The very discipline of Christian Science is itself a therapeutic. There
are really a good many things which become non-existent directly you
begin to act as if they did not exist. An atmosphere in which no one
refers to his ailment and every one to his well-being is a therapeutic
atmosphere. Psychologists have taught us that if we go through the
motions of being happy we are likely to have an access of happiness; if
we go through the motions of being unhappy we have an access of misery.
If we go through the motions of being well, very often we achieve a
sound measure of health.
_But it is Fundamentally a System of Suggestion_
All this has been so strongly dwelt upon of late as to make any extended
consideration of it unnecessary here, as indeed any extended
consideration is impossible for any one save a specialist. What we are
more concerned with is the way in which the discipline and philosophy of
Christian Science produce their results. The answer to this question is
as plain as anything can be in our present state of knowledge, for
essentially, as a healing force, Christian Science stands or falls with
the therapeutic power of suggestion. It is a strongly drawn system of
psycho-therapy because it is a strongly drawn system of suggestion. Its
suggestion involves assumptions which are sometimes philosophy,
sometimes theology, and more commonly a baffling interplay of the two.
But the outcome of it all is the practical persuasion on the part of the
patient that he is not sick and does not need so much to get well as to
demonstrate that he is well, and that in this demonstration he has an
absolute force on his side. To this end the whole body of affirmation,
persuasion, assumption, suggestion and technique of Christian Science is
directed. As one tries to analyze these separate elements they are,
taken singly, inconsistent, often unverifiable and often enough, by any
tests at all save the tests of Christian Science, positively untrue. But
as Mrs. Eddy has combined them and as they are applied in practice they
do possess an undeniable power. They are not dependent, as has been
said, fundamentally upon persons or things or places. Here is a coherent
system, the force of which may be felt when it is not understood and it
bears upon the perplexed or the impressionable with very great power. It
would be appreciably weakened if any one of its constituent elements
were taken out of it. But fundamentally it can do no more than any other
system of suggestion, unquestionably accepted, can do.
_It is Bound to be Affected by Our Growing Understanding of the Ranges
of Suggestion_
A deal of water has gone under the bridge since Mary Baker Eddy began
her work. What was then almost wholly involved in mystery is now
beginning to be reduced to law. The psychology of suggestion is by no
means clear as yet, nor are the students of it agreed in their
conclusions, but we do know enough about the complex character of
consciousness, the actuality of the subconscious and the reaction of
strongly held attitudes upon bodily states to be in the way, generally,
of freeing this whole great matter from the priest, the healer, the
charlatan or the prophet of strange cults and referring it hereafter for
direction and employment to its proper agents--the physician, the expert
in disordered mental conditions and the instructed spiritual adviser.
It is now generally agreed that suggestion, however induced, may
positively affect bodily function. If it is a wrong suggestion its
effects are hurtful, right suggestion its effects are helpful. Now since
a vast range of physical maladjustments--and this may be broadened to
include nervous maladjustments as well--is functional, suggestive
therapeutics have a far-reaching and distinct field. When Christian
Science or any other healing cult reports cures in this field, those
cures, if verified by sufficient testimony, may be accepted as
accomplished. Those who have accomplished them may take what credit they
will for their own agency in the matter, but for all that the cure is no
testimony at all to the truth or falsity of their system. It proves only
that those helped have believed it.
The matter of organic healing is more difficult. Medical Science does
not generally admit the possibility of organic change through
suggestion. There may be, however, a real difference of opinion as to
whether a particular trouble is functional or organic. Here is a
border-land not so much of fact as of diagnosis. A cure may be reported
as of an organic trouble when the basal diagnosis was wrong and it was
only functional, but the body possesses undoubtedly the power of
correcting or at least of limiting organic disease. Tuberculosis is an
organic disease but it is again and again limited and finally overcome
without the knowledge of the subject. Post-mortem examinations may
reveal scars in the lungs and so reflect processes only thus brought to
light.
Whatever serves general physical well-being may greatly help the body in
eliminating disease and securing a going measure of physical health. In
such indirect ways as these suggestion may, therefore, while not acting
directly upon diseased organism, contribute most distinctly to arrest
organic disease. Thoughtful physicians are ready to concede this and
thus open a door for a measure of organic healing which technically
their science denies. A very revealing light has been let in upon this
whole region by hypnotism. Some of the students of hypnotism are
inclined to go as far as to admit organic change under hypnotic
suggestion. "Strong, persistent impressions or suggestions made on the
reflex organic consciousness of the inferior centers may modify their
functional disposition, induce trophic changes, and even change organic
structures."[59]
[Footnote 59: Sidis, "The Psychology of Suggestion," p. 70.]
Christian Science, then, as a healing agency has a great field for there
are always folk enough to heal. It has a method, a discipline highly
effective in producing changed mental and spiritual states and,
strangely enough, it is all the more effective because it is so narrowly
true. Those to whom it makes its appeal are, for the most part, not
capable of analyzing through to their sources its fundamental
inveracities, nor would they be inclined to do that if they were able.
Its vagueness and its spacious rhetoric really give it power. It does
produce results and probably one case of physical betterment has a
prevailing power which a chapter of criticisms cannot overcome and, more
than that, one case of physical betterment may screen a dozen in which
nothing happened at all.
For Christian Science has in this region two alibis which can always be
brought into action, the most perfect ever devised. If it fails to cure
it is either because the one who was not cured lacked faith, or because
of the erroneous belief of some one else. A system which believes that
the toxic effect of poisons depends upon the vote of the majority in
that arsenic will cease to be a poison when everybody ceases to think of
it as a poison and will be a poison as long as anybody believes it is,
is perfectly safe even if it should fail to cure a case of arsenical
poison, for until facts and experience cease to weigh at all there will
always be some one somewhere believing that arsenic is a poison and that
one will be the scapegoat for the system.
_As a Religion it is Strongest in Teaching That God Has Meaning for the
Whole of Life_
Christian Science is, however, more than a system of mental
therapeutics, it is also a religion and due allowance must be made in
any just appraisal of it for the way in which it has made religion real
to many for whom religion had ceased to have a working reality. It needs
to be said on one side that a good deal of Christian Science religion is
really taking the Ark of God to battle, using religion, that is, for
comfort, material prosperity, health and just such tangible things. But
Christian Science meets a demand of the time also just here. Our own
age, deeply entangled in material satisfactions, has no mind to postpone
the satisfactions of religion to a future life. The monk and, indeed,
the generality of the devout in the medieval Church sought in
self-limited earthly joy a proper discipline for the soul and a state in
contrast to which the felicities for which they paid so great a price
should be the more welcome. The devout of Mary Baker Eddy's time, though
inclined to find in material well-being a plain mark of divine favour,
none the less accepted sickness and sorrow as from the hand of God and
prayed that with a meek and lowly heart they might endure this fatherly
correction and, having learned obedience by the things they suffered,
have a place amongst those who, through faith and patience, inherit His
presence.
But our own time is not so eager to inherit promises as to enter into
possession. A religion which does not demonstrate itself in actual
well-being is under suspicion. The social passion now much in evidence
among the churches grows out of this as well as the many cults which
seek the proof of the love of God in health, happiness and prosperity.
And indeed all this is natural and right enough. If religion be real the
fruits of it should be manifest, though whether these are the more
significant and enduring fruits of the spirit may be questioned. A
religion which demonstrates itself in motor-cars and generous incomes
and more than comfortable raiment may be real enough to those who
profess it, but its reality is not quite the reality of the religion of
the Sermon on the Mount.
Christian Science is in line with a distinct contemporaneous demand to
demonstrate God's love in about the terms of Jacob's famous vow at
Bethel--"If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go,
and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on so that I come again
to my father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God." This is a
far cry from the noble protestation of Job which sounds still across the
years: "Though he slay me, still will I trust in him."
And yet the more sensitive and richly endowed among the followers of
Mary Baker Eddy have found in Christian Science other values than these.
They have passed, by a sort of saving instinct, beyond its
contradictions and half-truths to what is centrally best in the whole
system. God, that is, has a meaning for life not hereafter but now, not
in creeds but in experience, not alone in hard disciplinary ways, but in
loving and intimate and helpful ways. True enough, this is no monopoly
of Christian Science; Christianity holds this truth in fee simple. But
unfortunately, in ways which it is perfectly possible to trace, the
great emphases of Christianity have in the past been too largely shifted
from this.
There has been and still is in most Protestant churches too much
reticence about the meaning of God for the individual life and maybe too
great hesitation in really using to the full the proffer of divine
power. The accepted understandings of the place of pain and suffering in
life have been, as it were, a barrier between the perplexed and their
God; His love has not, somehow, seemed sufficiently at the service of
men, and though Christian Science secures the unchallenged supremacy of
the love of God by emptying it of great ranges of moral meaning and
shutting away therefrom all the shadowed side of life, it has probably
justified the love of God to multitudes who have, for one reason and
another, heretofore questioned it and they have discovered in this
new-found sense of God's love and presence, a reality and wealth of
religious experience which they had never known before.
_It Exalts the Power of Mind But Ignores Too Largely the Processes by
Which Mind Realizes Its Ideals_
There is also in Christian Science practice and philosophy the
apprehension of a real truth which New Thought formulates much more
clearly. Mind is creative. (Not alone mind with a capital "M" but our
own every-day, human, small "m" mind.) The trouble is that Christian
Science hopelessly short-circuits the creative process. Our human world
is finally what we make it through our insight, our understanding and
above all by our sense of values, but the actual achievement of changed
purposes in a changed world is a process whose immensity is not even so
much as hinted at in "Science and Health." Christian Science too largely
ignores and seems commonly to deny the whole disciplinary side of life
with its inevitable accompaniment of failure, fault and pain. Pain is no
delusion; pain is the sign of something gone wrong in the great business
of normal physical life. Nor is sin only an unreality which "seems real
to human erring belief"; sin is a sign that something has gone wrong in
the struggle for a normal, disciplined, moral life. Nor is the whole
body of evil simply a shadow to be dismissed as easily as one turns
one's back upon some darkness and faces toward the light; evil is the
sign of something gone wrong, or something not yet attained in the
massive progress of a humanity which combines in itself so many
discordant elements, which has so long a way to go and so much to learn
and so many things to conquer as it struggles upward toward a happier
state.
Christian Science cannot in the end be true to the great facts of
experience, which have a power beyond the force of any assertion to
countervail, unless it is false to Mary Baker Eddy's philosophy, nor can
it be true to its philosophy without impoverishing moral and spiritual
endeavour. It is hard to find a place in the system--taken rigidly--for
sympathy or tenderness or the richest of human qualities, or for those
elements of wealth in character contributed by pain bravely borne or
sorrow uncomplainingly accepted. There is little place in Christian
Science for the Beatitudes and less still for that fine courage which is
itself the one assured victory which the hard beset may win on any field
of battle. The writer believes that while this severe judgment is
justified by "Science and Health," it is not justified by the practical
outcome of the cult in the lives of many of its disciples. They are in
devotion and kindness the equal of many in the Church and superior to
some. Their loyalty to their Church rebukes a good deal of orthodox
easy-going. All of which proves at least that life is bigger than our
theories about it and in the end subdues those who would make the best
of it, to communities of experience and understanding in which we are
all strangely kin. For, after all, unpleasant things cannot be thought
out; they must be fought out and dug out and lived out. The whole
redemptive force of society in thoroughgoing and far-reaching ways must
be brought to bear upon the very sources of all the evil side of life,
and the bare philosophy of Christian Science is not equal to this task.
_Is Not Big Enough for the Whole of Experience_
It is doubtful if Christian Science has ever made an appreciable change
in the mortality statistics of any city and yet if the Public Health
Department were to permit for forty-eight hours the milk or water supply
of a city to be polluted, statistics would disclose that within ten
days. This is only an illustration but it does illustrate. We must work
if we are to dig up the roots of evil things and get a better growth in
their stead and anything which attempts to substitute for this a denial
of the reality of the evil, a mystical religious attitude and a mere
formula of faith, no matter how oft repeated or how sincerely accepted,
or indeed no matter how efficacious in certain selected regions among
certain selected groups, is on the whole not a contribution to human
well-being.
Very likely Mrs. Eddy's followers in the practical conduct of their
lives are already recognizing this and gradually, and maybe
unconsciously, adapting themselves to it. There are already signs of
certain processes of conformity to the necessities of experience; these
are likely to go farther. If Christian Science follows the history of
such movements in the past, it will, after having made its own distinct
assertion of whatever measure of truth it contains, be gradually swept
back into the main current of religion and practice. It will maintain a
nominal distinctness, but in the general conduct of life it will lose
its more outstanding characteristics and become largely a distinction
without a difference. Milmine, in her thoughtful criticism of Christian
Science at the end of her history says that the future of Christian
Science stands or falls with psycho-therapy.
That is true only on the one side. As far as Christian Science has true
religious insights and approaches it will go on in spite of what happens
to psycho-therapy, though there is enough in psycho-therapy to assure
its future within well-defined regions if that were all. Something
bigger than psycho-therapy will finally judge and dismiss Christian
Science to its own place--life and experience will do that--and it is
safe to say that in the end Christian Science will have to come to terms
with a truth bigger than its own, with a body of experience which cannot
be dealt with on the selective process of taking what you want and
denying the rest, and more than that, it will have to come to terms with
the whole great matter of an intellectual, moral and spiritual struggle
governed by law and conditioned by the vaster world of which we are a
part. This is not to deny that Christian Science and allied teachings
have made contributions of real value to our common problem. It is only
to affirm that here is something not big enough for the whole either of
truth or experience.