Christian Science BY A LI The Reverend WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE, D.D. LL persons familiar with the intellectual life of our time. are conscious of a wave of "new thought " now sweeping over this country. This thought assumes Protean forms, and manifests itself in a mass of literature of all shades, from the sublime to the ridiculous. The movement has a twofold origin. On the one hand, it comes from the German idealism of Hegel and Fichte, which (mediated by Thomas Hill Green) has at last filtered down through all the strata of society and reached the average man. On the other hand, it comes from contact with the religions of the Orient, and a new appreciation of their mystic peace and brooding calm. A foretaste of this "new thought" appeared in the New England Transcendentalism of fifty years ago; it achieved its brightest literary expression in Emerson, and its passing embodiment in the Brook Farm experiment. But that movement was chiefly confined to New England. The present movement-a reaction from the deistic view of the world which has long pervaded both science and theology-covers the entire country, and is putting forth a quantity of literature of whose extent few are aware. The philosophy underlying the whole is optimistic and idealistic, and often claims and produces large results in bodily healing. Mrs. Eddy is only one the most successful one-of scores of teachers in this country who are now insisting on the power of thought to change life, and the immanence of God in such a sense that pain and grief and sin can be practically ignored. * Reprinted by permission of Fleming H. Revell Co; Copyrighted, 1899, Goodman & Dickerson Co. A CRUDE IDEALISM Most of these teachers are destitute of philosophical training, and are putting forth crude systems more wonderful than Joseph's coat which was not " of many colours." "They have been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps." They strongly antagonize each other, and unite only in antagonizing both materialism and scholastic orthodoxy. Oriental importations, the flotsam and jetsam of the Parliament of Religions, wander through the country, unfolding outworn theories of the Orient as the latest fad of the Occident. Indian Swamis enter Boston parlors and instruct companies of adoring women in the science of mist and moonbeams. Some of Mrs. Eddy's pupils, weary of her personal control, have revolted and set up schools of their own. "Metaphysical healing " is largely practiced in the eastern states by those who utterly reject Christian Science. On a much higher intellectual level are the books of Dr. Dresser, Ralph Waldo Trine and Henry Wood, all having an extraordinary sale, all insisting that "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” all giving an idealistic and spiritual interpretation of the universe, and all succeeding in lifting from scores of weary souls a burden of care and fear and pain which we have been taught is inalienable from human life. All of these teachers unite in rejecting the eighteenth-century conception of God as an “absentee," or as an occasional visitor," or as a magnified Lord Shaftesbury;" and when they are theists in any real sense, affirm that God is immanent in the human soul, and that if we will but "practice His presence we shall be delivered from all the ills consequent on faith in a distant deity. We may at least rejoice that the tendencies of our time are no longer toward disbelief in a spiritual world. So far has the pendulum swung, that the same popular literature which, thirty years ago, was trying to believe that "thought is a secretion of the brain," now gravely affirms that the brain is a figment of thought! 66 66 What, now is the particular phase of this thought embodied |