Chapter III: Part 3

And under Christian Science who, for example, will care for the deaf and dumb unfortunates in the community? Material science, seconded by human sympathy, has greatly helped to rob deafness and dumbness of more of their power to discourage and depress. I have met deaf people who were so well trained to read the movement of the lips as to be able to converse freely. What will Christian Science do for these unfortunates? Has it ever taken thought of them? And has Christian Science ever planned or built homes for crippled children--the poor little ones who cannot walk or move without pain? And what has metaphysics ever done in the fight against the white plague? Has it made a single discovery, or given a new weapon to man against any of the evils human flesh is heir to? With this Asiatic superstition or fatalistic belief, masquerading as Christian and scientific, in control of our institutions, all sanitary laws, such as the pure food law, the law requiring the fumigation of houses or the isolation of their inmates suffering from contagious diseases, the laws requiring the inspection of ships from plague-ridden ports, those requiring fireproof public buildings or providing for fire escapes and a hundred other safety-first measures, will receive scant attention.

To see and fight evil is wiser than to shut our eyes to it. The rose is no more real than the thorns which guard it. The tear is as natural as the smile, and equally divine. To be able to suffer for those we love, and for a cause we prize, is a privilege.

Christian Science robs people of the feeling of sympathy, without which man and marble become alike. But sympathy is born of the consciousness that there are pain and suffering, evil and error, in the world. Cognizance of evil is not permitted to a Christian Scientist. Being in Nirvana himself, the disciple of Mrs. Eddy neither sees nor feels, or at least he pretends not to see or feel, the sorrow that draws the tear. Are there not times when, as the poet Hood in his _Ode to Melancholy_ says, the genuine tear is nobler than the artificial smile?

Oh, give her, then, her tribute just,

Her sighs and tears and musings holy!

There is no music in the life

That sounds with idiot laughter solely.

"Christian Science makes people happy" is an argument often advanced. No doubt it does. But we are not discussing "Is Christian Science Comforting?" but "Is it true?" Ignorance is bliss, it has been said; but does that prove that ignorance should be cultivated and knowledge suppressed?

I met a young woman just the day before her mother's funeral who behaved as if she and the woman who had borne her, nursed her, carried her in her arms, who had watched day and night over her cradle and risked her life for her a hundred times, were total strangers. The young woman was a Christian Scientist. Eliminate the sympathy which consciousness of a struggling and suffering world inspires, and art, literature, poetry, morality, and the humanities wither like a branch deprived of the quickening sap.

Jesus was called the man of sorrows. Could he have been a Christian Scientist?

"Jesus wept" is written in the Gospel of John. Sorrow and tears are heresies to the perpetually smiling followers of Mrs. Eddy.

Let us have men and women who fear neither the thorn nor the tear, but who use them as stepping-stones to greater strength. The way to meet evil is to grapple with it soldier-like. Man is not an ostrich, and burying one's head in the sand is a coward's policy.

To live is to act, and to act is to combat.

But darkness cannot be overcome with jargon. To conquer we need the weapons of Prometheus--knowledge and courage!

End of Project Gutenberg's What is Christian Science?, by M. M. Mangasarian