Christian Science

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 14074, 4 December 1909, Page 3 (Supplement)

Christian Science

A SEVERE HANDLING. In a paper read at the recent Anglican Church Congress at Swansea iir Stephen Paget severely handled the claims and pretensionns of Christian science. It was certain, he said, that Christian science generally exercised over her followers a quieting influence. They were made more restful, more successful in business, more active, less nervous, L-ss worried, more glad that they were alive, less apt for grumbling and for gossiping. Its doctrines gave no great encouragement to the oldfashioned virtuesi—humility, accuracy, courage, patience, compassion, reverence, charity; but they did give a happy sense of quiet and the • comfort of ample phrases. The chloroform of its teaching acted not only on the iritiea! ii.i-.nty, but on the will. Here, in ibis hu.ui..:ig. of the will, this passive isnh.tio.'t i.f dulling of the mind were the v.-ry conditions for mental healing; and if they studied, for example,the testimonies of those who had been healed, by Cliristian science, of smoking, drinking, and the drughabit, they found as it were, the word hypnotism stamped on every page of their evidence. There was no hard tight over the tobacco and tho alcohol, no long-drawn agonising misery over the morphia and the cocaine; they ceased to believe that these pleasures were pleasant, and then they left off wanting them. Not long ago, he tabulated, for a hook on Christian science, 200 consecutive "testimonies of healing." The vast majority eases of indigestion, constipation, backache, headache, tired feeling, weakness of vision, functional disabilities, downright imagination, and so forth. He inquired into the alleged healings of grave organic diseases. He found not one authenticated case_ of any such healing. He found nothing,

[ absolutely nothing, that ' might not I have got well "of itself," or got well, I <>r at any rate better, under one or ' another of tho many forms of mental : Treatment. Christian science did not '. publish her failures. So he wrote to i some doctors, and other friends, ask- '< ing them to tell him cases of tho harm ' that she had done. He got back a : long list of killed and wounded; he i wished that it could be nailed to the. : doors of all her churches. Seeing the ; gross and shameful malpractices ol ; Christian science, and the long trail of pain and of death that she left, be- ' hind her and her inpudent coneeal- : ment of all her failures and worse than i failures, ami her notion that all dsi seases alike were mental, and nme oi ! them in reality there ; and her mad 1 >'- ! solve never tn examine a case, or rend i :i medical book, or look at. a specimen, or take a temperature, or listen to a chest, or use a microscope, or acknowledge any difference between ordinary backache and spinal caries, beiweon functual paralysis. between indigestion and cancer of the stomach, between pain in the breast and cancer of the breast; and her frequent cruelty, to small children: and her brutal way of saying that her patients died of want of understanding what she told them —seeing all these abominations, they ought to prevent even the faintest shadow of tliein fulling across the Church. Nothing had happened yet in spiritual healing which had not its counter part in mesmerism, treatment, bv suggestion, or commonplace medical attendance.