With all such scientific, consecrated work
Christian Scientists are necessarily out of sym-
pathy. Given the premise that God is all in all,
that matter does not exist, that disease is not
real, and we understand the antipathy of Chris-
ian Scientists to preventive medicine and to
scientific research, their indifference to stetho-
scopes, thermometers, charts, reports, the class-
ification of diseases and even to diagnosis —
the careful determining of the specific nature
of a given disease. To all such procedure,
which is of the very essence of real science,
Christian Scientists are indifferent, not, mark
you, because they are ignorant (I would that
more people were as cultured as some represen-
tatives of this cult whom I know), nor yet again

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because they are heartless (for, generally speak-
ing, they are kindly, sympathetic folk), but
because the very basis of Christian Science com-
pels this indifference. But I hold that the
human mind is disgraced if the labors of scien-
tists, from Hippocrates to Pasteur and Bhrlich
and Lister are to be swept aside, and they who
have undergone none of the patient toil of medi-
cal research are to step in and replace those who
have received the tradition of more than two
thousand years and who by earnest application
in laboratories, hospitals and schools have
fitted themselves to practice the divine art of
healing. And despite all its failures, it is still
the divine art ; the art that banished pain in the
dreamless sleep of anaesthesia; that conquered
diseases which once claimed their victims by
the thousand; that transformed poisons into
medicines ; that took from gushing streams and
growing herbs and buried metals beneficent ele-
ments to meet the crying needs of suffering man ;
the art that reduced the mortality statistics of
diphtheria so that now children have ninety-six
chances of recovery, where formerly they had
but four.
