CHRISTIAN SCIENCE continued men, for that all have sinned” (Rom. 5:12).
is divesting her mind of all reality. She has a blindfold over her eyes, and all around her crimes of every kind are being committed, such as a man’s blowing out another’s brains with a revolver, etc. It is not evil to her. Her mind is divested of the reality of it. The Scriptures have ex plained it this way: “ In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ . . . should shine unto them” (2 Cor. 4:4). This teaching regarding sin has lost Christian Science many followers who might otherwise have gone along with her metaphysics. But sin is too much a part of this world to keep up this pretense of denying its reality very long unless one is insane. Even in Mrs. Eddy’s lifetime she had to admit this: “ Perhaps no doc trine of Christian Science rouses so much natural doubt and questioning as this, that God knows no such thing as sin” ( Unity of Good, p. 1). Once in a while a real vital com mon-sense question reached her con sciousness and she had to reply: “ If there is no sin, why did Jesus come to save sinners? . . . Jesus came to seek and to save . . . them from this false belief” (ital. hers) ( Miscel laneous Writings, p. 63). P andita Ramabai was right in the passage I have quoted: Christian Science, prating of love, is cold and heartless. Broken homes, broken lives, broken hearts, mean nothing to them. Politi cal corruption, juvenile and adult de linquency, immorality, drunkenness, robbery, injustice, make no impres sion upon them. Their great religious goddess, Mrs. Eddy, stated: “ The Sci ence of Mind disposes of all evil” (S & H, p. 473, line 4). And so it just disappears at her word! To a verse like Romans 3:23: “ For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God,” she has this kind of an answer: “What sins? . . . A culprit, a sinner—anything but a man!” ( Miscellaneous Writings, p. 61). Only those whose consciences are “ seared as with a hot iron” can ac cept a teaching of the nothingness of ,sin. Jesus said, “ If ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins” (John 8:24). He hung on the cross “ in agony and blood” to make it possible for our sins to be forgiven, washed away and for us to be justi fied before God. Anyone who believes
this awful delusion that there is no sin, and no accountability for sin to a holy God, will find out in the hour of death that it is indeed “ a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a liv ing God” without a Saviour. Christian Science and Sickness Along with her denial of the reality of sin is Mrs. Eddy’s denial of the actuality of sickness. In this realm she reaches the heights of absurdity, and has brought her teaching into rid icule because normal people are quite conscious of the reality of the flesh and the ills it is heir to. I quote again her basic statement: “Man is incapable of sin, sickness and death” (S & H, p. 459, 74th ed.). From the ever-increasing numbers of hospitals, medical and nurses’ training institu tions, it certainly appears that man is quite capable of sickness! Christian Science “healings” are all based upon the denial of actual sick ness or pain. In a word, you are healed because you were never sick in the first place; it was only an il lusion of mortal mind. Modem psy chiatry will back her up to this ex tent: that if the illness is only in the mind, the mind can certainly be used to effect the cure. But Mrs. Eddy goes beyond that and claims cures of actual physical maladies— even to the extent of replacing lost limbs—all by mind-healing. Read it in her book Unity of Good (p. 7): “ It is due both to Christian Science and to myself . . . to enable me instanteously to heal a cancer which had eaten its way to the jugu lar vein . . . In the same spiritual con dition I have been able to replace dislocated joints and raise the dying to instanteous health.” “ By mind alone I have prevented disease, preserved and restored health, healed chronic as well as acute ail ments in their severest forms, elongat ed shortened limbs, relaxed rigid mus cles, re s to red decaying bones to healthy conditions, brought back the lost substance of lungs and caused them to resume their proper func tions ( S & H, p. 16, 28th ed.). Listen to this: “ If you sprain the muscles or wound the flesh, your remedy is at hand. Mind decides whether or not the flesh shall be dis colored, painful, swollen or inflamed” (S & H, p. 385, lines 18-21). I t will not hurt you or swell or become black and blue if you think it will not. By the same reasoning, you could fall from a
Mrs. Eddy asks: “ Is man lost spir itually? No, he can only be lost materially . . . Sin . . . cannot be spiritual” (S & H, p. 371, lines 7, 8 and p. 34, 28th ed.). Matthew 15:19 states that sin can be spiritual. “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adul teries, fornications, thefts, false wit ness, blasphemies.” Mrs. Eddy did not believe in the fall of man. That too is founded upon her basic delusion that all is unreal: “ Never born, and never dying, it were impossible for man, under govern ment of God in eternal Science, to fall from his high estate” (S & H, p. 258, lines 27, 28). She claimed that God was unaware of man’s sin and in her book, “ Unity of Good” refers to “ God’s blindness to error and ignorance of sin” (p. 6). But the Lord’s reply to this is con tained in Acts 17:30,31: “ God . . . now commandeth all men every where to repent: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained.” God is not only fully cognizant of man’s sin, but He is going to do something about man’s disobedience to Him and rejection of His Son one day. Now here is a strange thing. Mrs. Eddy’s premise is, of course, that there is no sin. In fact, she declares in Miscellaneous Writings: “ The Science of good calls evil nothing . . . Here . . . is found the pith of the basal statement, the cardinal point in Christian Science, that matter and evil (including all inharmony, sin, disease and death) are unreal” (p. 27). Alright, according to her, there is no sin; it just does not exist. Then she tells you how you can get rid of sin. If it does not exist, why is there a remedy for getting rid of it? Here is the recipe: “ To get rid of sin, through Science, is to divest sin of any supposed mind or reality” (S & H, p. 234, 74th ed.). This is how it is done: Mrs. Eddy says you are not to believe the five senses which she calls “ lying wit nesses.” In other words, you are not to believe what you see, what you hear, what you taste, what you smell and what you touch. I have before me a cartoon which I consider very much to the point. A Christian Science woman is putting Mrs. Eddy’s recipe into practice: she
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TH E K IN G 'S BU SINESS
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