" WORKS OF THE DEVIL."

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14223, 20 November 1909, Page 2 (Supplement)

" WORKS OF THE DEVIL."

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE r EXPOSED BE- " FORE THE CLERGY.

TRAIL OF DEATH. A rkmakkablk , exposure 'of the fraud of Christian Scjcnce ;and,, the dangers attaching to the use of spiritual healing was made at the Church; Congress, Swansea, by Mr. Stephen Paget, the famous surgeon. He especially singled otit for attack the Society of Emmanuel, a. body in the 'West End of London, which, with the support of local clergy, is steadily growing in num-

bers. ;; • '■•'..■„ ■ ■'-• ' ■ ' " Not. long ago," , said Mr. Paget, "I tabulated 200 consecutive so-called 'testimonies of healing.' The vast majority were cases of indigestion, constipation, backache, headache, tired feeling, weakness of vision, functional disabilities, downright imagination, and so forth. "I inquired into the alleged healing of grave organic diseases. I found not one authentic case of any such healing. I found absolutely nothing that might not have got well 'of itself,' or got well, or at any rate better, under one or another of the many forms of mental treatment. "The"general style of these 200 testimonies was fantastical, vague, illiterate, and absolutely worthless.

* list' OK failures. ' "Christian Science does not publish her failures. . So I wrote to some doctors and other friends asking them to tell ifre case 3 of the harm that she has done. I got back a long list of killed and wounded. I wish that it could be nailed to the doors of all her churches. ; '■■■■

"To see the full iniquity of these cases the reader should be a doctor or should go over them with a doctor. But everybody, doctor or not. can feel the cruelty born of the fear of pain in some of these scientists, the downright madness threatening not" a few of them, and the appalling self-will. They bully dying women, and let babies die in pain. They let cases of paralysis tumble about and hurt themselves, they rob the epileptic cases of their bromide, the angina cases' of their amyl nitrite, and the heart cases of their digitalis. "They let appendicitis go on to septic peritonitis, gastric ulcer to. perforation of the stomach, nephritis to unemic convul-sions,-and strangulated hernia to the miserere mei or gangrene. ; . ' • "They watch day after day while a man or a woman slowly bleeds to death, they compel those who should be kept still to take exercise, and withhold from all cases of cancer all. hope of cure. '•, " To these works of the devil they bring their one gift—wilful and complete ignorance—and their 'nursing,' which would be a farce if it were not tragic. Such is the way of Christian Science face to face as she" loves to be with bad cases of organic disease.

"Seeing the gross and shameful malpractices of Christian Science and "the long, trail of pain and of death that she, leaves behind; her impudent concealment of all her failures and worse than failures her notion that all diseases alike are mental, and none of them in reality there; her mad resolve never to examine a case or read a medical book; her frequent cruelty, especially to small children, and her brutal way of saying that her patients die of want of understanding what she tells them; seeing all these abominations, we ought to prevent even the faintest shadow of ihem from, falling "across our Church. ; ' IMAGINARY MIRACLES." "We have not done that," Mr. Paget declared, with warmth. "In London the Society of Emmanuel is under her shadow; indeed, it is her shadow. It publishes miracles which never happened, it countenances exorcism, it, denies point-blank that our Lord in the whole of His life was ever ill, it has reprinted the case of a man who was healed instantaneously, in the last stages of what .was described as consumption in the lower "part of the body.

" Such a disease is as mythical as Mrs. Eddy's malignant tubercular diphtheria. Can you wonder that we doctors laugh at spiritual healing, if this be spiritual healing? Nothing has happened yet in spiritual healing which has not its counterpart in mesmerism, treatment by suggestion, or commonplace medical attendance." }