Christian Science as a System of Healing and a Religion : Part 5

Modern Religious Cults and Movements
by Gaius Glenn Atkins

(Page 12 of 17)

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 therefore 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 trophy changes, and even change organic structures."

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 favor, 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 should 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 from 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.

Copyright 1923 by Fleming H. Revell Company