Christian Science

(From Horton Davies, understood to be out of copyright)

Who in the days of his flesh, having offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears...though he was a Son, yet learned obedience by the things which he suffered.
(Heb. 5.7-8)

Christian Science is the most recent and, in Protestant countries, the most effective religious rival of the historic Christian faith. It bears so manifestly the hall-mark of its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, that it is impossible to understand it apart from the spiritual odyssey of that lady.

She was born in 1821 in the New Hampshire town of Bow, being the sixth child of a gentleman-farmer and his wife, who were respected members of the Congregational Church. She was a highly sensitive child who reacted strongly against the stern and forbidding Calvinism of her father's creed. Her later teaching was formulated in antagonism to the unchallenged Calvinist tenet that trials and sorrows are natural and inevitable and are sent by God for the spiritual strengthening of His children. During most of her childhood she was subject to a serious nervous illness which continued through many years of adulthood. She was not only unfortunate in having an unsympathetic father, but also an unsympathetic husband. Her first husband was a building-contractor, whose profits were made by the exploitation of the slaves he owned. Soon after the marriage, he died of yellow fever, leaving her with a small son and considerable assets. These she employed in freeing the slaves and in educating her child. The young widow then married a dentist. So physically enfeebled was the bride that Dr. Patterson had to carry her downstairs from her room for the ceremony and return her there on its completion. Patterson was also a scapegrace, who became infatuated with other women and left her to bring up her ailing child alone. However, he performed one good turn for his wife by introducing her to an unorthodox healer, renowned throughout New England as Phineas P. Quimby. He was a man of great personal magnetism. It was he who gave her the hints on which she was to build her system of Christian Science. He claimed that there was only one cure for all diseases - the confidence of the patient in the healer.

He described his healing art in the following fashion: 'My practice,' he said, 'is unlike all medical practice. I give no medicine, and make no outward applications. I tell the patient his troubles, and what he thinks is his disease, and my explanation is the cure. If I succeed in correcting his errors, I change the fluids of the system, and establish the patient in health. The truth is the cure.'

Mrs. Eddy's indebtness to Quimby was greater than she cared to admit. His manuscripts, which have since been published, reveal that he referred to his new mind-healing system as 'Christian Science', and that he called disease 'an error', and this is, in fact, the most distinctive doctrine associated with the name of Mary Baker Eddy. 'Disease', he wrote, 'is false reasoning. False reasoning is sickness and death.' On his death in 1866, Mrs. Eddy did not mreely repudiate her indebtness to Quimby, but went so far as to claim that he had borrowed these ideas from her. Her conceited desire to claim absolute originality for her teaching resulted in the palpable untruth she wrote in her compendium of Christian Science:

"No human pen nor tongue taught me the science contained in the book". [1]

Mary Baker Patterson (as she was then named), presented herself in October 1862 at the International Hotel, Portland, Maine, to this Phineas P. Quimby. He told her that her animal spirit was reflecting its grief upon her body, and calling it spinal disease. He then dipped his hands in water, rubbed her head violently, and sent her into a mesmeric sleep. She awoke cured of her pain. The next day he repeated the treatment; the cure was as complete as it was swift. Moreover, there was no relapse. Her disease, she explained to Quimby, was cured by the healer's understanding of the truth of Christ brought by Him into the world and lost for centuries, and not by Quimby's mesmerism. Quimby denied this, being an arrant unbeliever. But his patient refused to accept his disclaimer, and was so far restored to health that she mounted the hundred and eighty-two steps to the Dome of the City Hall to advertise to the world the greatness of Quimby.

She spent the next two years lecturing on Quimby and in trying to Christianize his faith-cures, by writing comments on his case-book. Meanwhile Quimby died of an ulcer in the stomach in 1866. This year is the date given for the official foundation of Christian Science. One can only conjecture that the reason was that now Quimby was dead, he could no longer dispute Mary Baker Patterson's claim to be the founder of Christian Science.

She began by treating private patients and by lecturing on the art of faith-healing. In 1875 there appeared her world-famous handbook Science and Health. Two years later she married Eddy, a business-man, the equable and congenial agent for a firm of sewing-machine manufacturers. Henceforward Christian Science was to stand upon a firm business footing. Mr. Asa Gilbert Eddy saw that the second and third editions of his wife's handbook were protected from literary piracy and thus safeguarded the copyright and the considerable profits. The new "Bible" sold for three dollars a copy. Mr. Eddy also introduced his wife to influential persons in Boston, where she lectured. He was her devoted missionary. After these days she never looked back. 668 'churches' in North America acknowledge her as their spiritual leader. She founded a College, an organisation with international ramifications, and a famous newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor.

She proved herself to be a woman of administrative ability, business acumen and dominating personality. Her logical and speculative abilities were of no mean order, and greatly outran her capacity for literary expression. Her greatest quality was her determination to help heal the sorrows and ills of mankind, for which she had a deep and lasting sympathy. She rediscovered and expressed in her own character the radiance that should be the distinguising mark of the Christian life. This frail person was an astonishing example of the triumph of mind over matter until her death of pneumonia in 1910 at the age of eighty-nine.

What was the key to her success and what were the benefits of her popular system? She undoubtedly gave a new sense of well-being to multitudes of neurotic and depressed persons. She radiated confidence and thousands of timid, melancholy and self-pitying people regained a sense of cheerful robustness and a faith to live by. It would be less than just to deny the two main values that her creed undoubtedly possessed: in a materialistic age she inculcated a belief in the spiritual interpretation of life, and she rediscovered the Christian art of faith-healing. Her system brought many other benefits also. She restored the notes of health and happiness to the Christian symphony. She effectively repudiated such unworthy notions of God as the belief that all pain is a divine imposition on God's children to teach them resignation. She propagated a profound belief in the goodness of God; so profound, in fact, that she met the age-old problem of evil in a divinely created universe by flatly denying its existence. She and her disciples were motivated by a deep sense of Christian charity. She deserves our gratitude for the happiness she has brought to thousands of mentally sick persons and for the stimulus she has been to the Christian Churches to return to psychological methods of healing.

Her system of thought has been summarized by the author herself, as follows:

"First, God is all in all.
Second, God is good, good is mind.
Third, spirit being all, nothing is matter.
Fourth, life, God, omnipotent, good, deny death, evil, sin, disease-
Disease, sin, evil, death, deny good, omnipotent, God, life." [2]

It will be immediately apparent that her system is based upon four categorical details. She denies the existence of matter, pain, evil and death, all four of which historic Christianity is concerned to affirm as having a real existence in time. She declares, "Matter or body is but a false concept of mortal mind". [3] It is one thing to say that matter is not eternal; it is quite another to say that it does not exist at all. At the very outset this denial makes absurd the central Christian doctrine, that the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us. Why was she prompted to make this denial contrary to all our human experience? Probably because she thought that the body was the source of all evil; but this is not so - for it is the imagination and the will that are the sources of sinfulness. For the Christian there is nothing evil in matter or in the world, except the imagination and the will that are the sources of sinfulness. For the Christian there is nothing evil in matter or in the world, except the misuse which we may make of either. Indeed, our spiritual worth is proven by the way we make use of our bodies.

In the second place, Mary Baker Eddy denies the existence of pain and sickness. Pain and suffering, she teaches, depend on our foolish belief in matter. She goes so far as to assert:

"A child may have worms, if you say so, or any other body" [4]

Absurdity can surely go no further than the following citation from Science and Health:

"A boil simply manifests through inflammation and swelling a belief in pain, and this belief is called a boil."

To this the only appropriate retort is to recite the limerick:

"There was a faith-healer of Deal,
Who said, "Although pain isn't real,
When I sit on a pin
And it punctures my skin,
I dislike what I fancy I feel".

It may readily be granted that pain is often exaggerated: nervous persons and hypochondriacs often imagine they are a prey to a disease which exists only in their fancies. [5] Many people make themselves ill through sheer worrying. But it is totally different to assert that pain in all its forms is sheer illusion. The heart of the Christian Gospel is that we have a suffering Saviour and that by faith in Him we are able to transform suffering into blessing, sin into righteousness, death into eternal life. Our faith is built on that strange Man who hangs upon the Cross. It seems pertinent to ask: How can a faith be Christian, when it denies the reality of the Cross, the acknowledged centre and sign of historic Christianity? H. A. L. Fisher says, in the conclusion of Our New Religion:

"For the Christian Scientist a brilliant pioneer of drugless healing...replaces the suffering figure on the Cross."

Thirdly, Mrs. Eddy denies the reality of evil and sin. She declares, "Both sin and sickness are error, and Truth is their remedy." [6] This denial issues from an honourable determination to "justify the ways of God to man". She preserves the unassailable goodness of God by the expedient of denying that sin and evil exist. To assert that sin does not exist, except as an illusion, is virtually to deny the saving work of Christ and to make His sufferings and death mere phantasms. Jesus, on the hypothesis of the Christian Scientists, laboured under the 'delusion' that sin was a reality. Either our Lord's desire to redeem mankind and obtain forgiveness for their sins was an error, or, at least, Jesus came only to prove that our belief in sin was mistaken. By contrast the central tradition of the Christian faith holds that 'all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God', but that all may be redeemed in Jesus Christ, who has won the final victory over the rebellion of mankind in the Cross and Resurrection, which He communicates to the new People of God, the Christian Church. Christian realism is possible, as Dr. Nathaniel Micklem so pertinently remarks, only because the Cross prevents us from shallow optimism and the Resurrection from superficial pessimism. The philosophy (though not necessarily the lives) of Christian Scientists seems, in the absence of the dimension of the Cross, shallow and escapist.

In the fourth place, the existence of death is denied. Mrs. Eddy asserts, 'Life is real and death is an illusion'. [7] Her reasoning seems to be that since we are essentially spiritual and the matter of our bodies is illusory, there is nothing left of us that can die. This, of course, is in open contradiction to the Christian faith which is born out of the Easter experience, when death was not evaded, but conquered by the Risen Lord. Furthermore, this automatic immortality is at variance with the most solemn warnings of our Saviour and His apostles that there is a way of salvation and a way of damnation.

One is bound to admire the logical consistency of Mrs. Eddy in her denials, but her life was not consistent with her declared beliefs. For example, she wore artificial teeth and spectacles, showing that her theories did not apply, at least, to diseases of the teeth and eyes. A more serious inconsistency, however, was publicly revealed in a protest addressed to the trustees of Mrs. Eddy by Mr. John V. Dittemore (a former director of the Mother Church of Christian Science), in which he wrote:

"As you will know, Mrs. Eddy employed physicians professionally, and took drugs on numerous occasions during the last ten years of her life." [8]

Her philosophy of life also falls under censure for serious misrepresentation of Christian doctrine in two important respects; namely, her teaching about the personality of God and of Jesus Christ. Her God is impersonal, for

"Life, truth and love constitute the triune God, or triple Divine principle." [9]

That she does not accept the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity appears from her avowal:

"The theory of three persons in one God (that is, a personal Trinity or Tri-unity) suggests heathen gods." [10]

In fact, she invites us to believe the impossible - and impersonal principle with personal attributes such as love.

Her account of Jesus Christ is equally unorthodox. She revives that most ancient of heresies, Docetism, in denying the reality of our Lord's human nature:

"Wearing in part a human form (that is, as it seemed to human view), being conceived by a human mother, Jesus was a Mediator between the Spirit and flesh, between Truth and error." [11]

She further denies that Jesus died by crucifixion. In her volume, Miscellany, she speaks of "the supposedly crucified Christ", and interprets Romans 5:10 as meaning "for when we were enemies, we were reconciled by the seeming death of Christ". Her claim to have surpassed the apostles in her understanding of the mission of Christ is contained in the following citation:

"Jesus' students, not sufficiently advanced to fully understand their Master's triumph, did not perform many wonderful works until they saw Him after His crucifixion, and learned that He had not died." [12]

But she approaches blasphemy when she declares of Jesus:

"Had wisdom characterized all His sayings, He would not have prophesied His own death and thereby hastened or caused it." [13]

A denial of the reality of the Incarnation, the Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ refutes entirely the claim that her system is a Christian Science.

Apart from these serious distortions and denials of the Christian message, Christian Science must be accounted dangerous for other reasons. Many lives have been lost through the inability of Mrs. Baker Eddy to distinguish between illness caused by germ invasion and illness caused by psychological factors. H. A. L. Fisher avers in Our New Religion that the refusal of Christian Scientists to co-operate with members of the medical profession lays them open to the charge of being murderers. It is certain, at least, that they are parasites living upon the precautions of preventive medicine and public health. Furthermore, it is significant that although Christian Science has vast funds, opulent premises and enthusiastic workers, it is never found bringing its mission of health and happiness to the slums. Finally, it can fairly be accused of making religion a means to an end, for God is the means and the end is man's physical well-being. Like Spiritualism it must be accounted a 'Glory for me' and not a 'Glory for God' religion.

These defects in the Christian Science system should make Christians all the more sensible of the greatness of the truth as it is in Christ Jesus. Its realism urges not an evasion of sin, suffering and death, but an attack upon them. A Christian is a follower of a Lord who said: 'In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.'

Further, the Gospel moves in a bracing, Christian Science in a relaxed, atmosphere. Jesus said, 'If any man will come after me, let him...take up his cross and follow me'. Mary Baker Eddy says, in effect, 'I invite you to a Christianity without tears'. But that cannot be! Christianity is only for those who offer the tears of repentance, who, like Peter, weep bitterly when they hear the cock crow, and remember their broken promises. It is a religion that speaks loudest in sighs, such as Mary's when she lamented, 'They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid Him'. Christianity offers a God who shall wipe away all tears. It is the divine answer to all our human sobbing - to the sobbing of the sinner, the sufferer and the bereft. If we are told that these experiences are unreal, we can only reply that the Christian Scientists are tone-deaf to the tragic notes of our human symphony. Life's foes demand to be faced with bracing realism, not evaded by Christian Science's escapism.

Christian Science is, in fact, a misnomer. It is neither Christian nor scientific. Mary Baker Eddy's cures are remembered, and rightly, with gratitude; her four casualties should not be forgotten - her three husbands and herself.

Footnotes

1 Science and Health (Bird) p. 110

2 Science and Health (Bird), p. 113

3 ibid., p. 413

4 Science and Health (Bird) p. 413

5 Transcriber's Note: We know this better now as psychosomatic illness, that is, illness which feels real, but is actually a product only of the mind and not the body.

6 Science and Health (Bird), p. 461

7 Science and Health (Bird) p. 428

8 Reported in The Christian World, Feb. 28, 1929, and cited in Leslie D. Weatherhead, Psychology in the Service of the Soul (Epworth, 1949) p. 219

9 Science and Health (Bird), p. 277

10 ibid., p. 152

11 Science and Health (Bird) p. 211

12 ibid., p. 45

13 Cited L. D. Weatherhead, City Temple Tidings, Nov. 1950, p. 259