Modern Religious Cults and MovementsAtkins, Gaius Glenn
Religion
Modern Religious Cults and Movements
Atkins, Gaius Glenn
Christian Science; New Thought; Religion; Spiritual healing
There is also in Christian Science practice and philosophy the
apprehension of a real truth which New Thought formulates much more
clearly. Mind is creative. (Not alone mind with a capital "M" but our
own every-day, human, small "m" mind.) The trouble is that Christian
Science hopelessly short-circuits the creative process. Our human world
is finally what we make it through our insight, our understanding and
above all by our sense of values, but the actual achievement of changed
purposes in a changed world is a process whose immensity is not even so
much as hinted at in "Science and Health." Christian Science too largely
ignores and seems commonly to deny the whole disciplinary side of life
with its inevitable accompaniment of failure, fault and pain. Pain is no
delusion; pain is the sign of something gone wrong in the great business
of normal physical life. Nor is sin only an unreality which "seems real
to human erring belief"; sin is a sign that something has gone wrong in
the struggle for a normal, disciplined, moral life. Nor is the whole
body of evil simply a shadow to be dismissed as easily as one turns
one's back upon some darkness and faces toward the light; evil is the
sign of something gone wrong, or something not yet attained in the
massive progress of a humanity which combines in itself so many
discordant elements, which has so long a way to go and so much to learn
and so many things to conquer as it struggles upward toward a happier
state.
Christian Science cannot in the end be true to the great facts of
experience, which have a power beyond the force of any assertion to
countervail, unless it is false to Mary Baker Eddy's philosophy, nor can
it be true to its philosophy without impoverishing moral and spiritual
endeavour. It is hard to find a place in the system--taken rigidly--for
sympathy or tenderness or the richest of human qualities, or for those
elements of wealth in character contributed by pain bravely borne or
sorrow uncomplainingly accepted. There is little place in Christian
Science for the Beatitudes and less still for that fine courage which is
itself the one assured victory which the hard beset may win on any field
of battle. The writer believes that while this severe judgment is
justified by "Science and Health," it is not justified by the practical
outcome of the cult in the lives of many of its disciples. They are in
devotion and kindness the equal of many in the Church and superior to
some. Their loyalty to their Church rebukes a good deal of orthodox
easy-going. All of which proves at least that life is bigger than our
theories about it and in the end subdues those who would make the best
of it, to communities of experience and understanding in which we are
all strangely kin. For, after all, unpleasant things cannot be thought
out; they must be fought out and dug out and lived out. The whole
redemptive force of society in thoroughgoing and far-reaching ways must
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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