CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 April 1939, Page 7

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

ADDRESS AT CARTERTON. “Health, abundance, and security are within the reach of every industrious man and woman,” declared Peter V. Ross, C. S. B„ of San Francisco, in a lecture on Christian Science given on Sunday afternoon, at the Tivoli Theatre, Carterton. Mr Ross, a member of The Christian Science Board’ of Lectureship of The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, spoke here under the auspices of Christian Church of Christ, Scientist, of the Science Society, Carterton. Referring to God as Life, and to frian as an exhibit of divine_Life, he said: “Disease cannot be genuine. This is why sufferers are constantly in revolt against it. If disease were a reality people would have to accept it without protest, for realities cannot be evaded or overcome. DISEASE NOT GENUINE. “Science insists that disease is in belief, in appearance, or in ignorance, rather than in reality. It belongs in the same category with the belief in the flatness of the earth. For certainly the earth appears flat. Occasionally to this day may be found a person who believes it flat. Obviously the flatness is in his thought, in his ignorance. Some day the simple fact will dawn upon him that the earth is round. Then the flatness will be cured. “Some day the undeniable fact will dawn upon the supposedly sick man that Life is God. Then his sickness will be . healed, because disease and mortality cannot be ascribed to Deity. If God is Life, then Life must be diseaseless, ageless, endless.” MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE. “Human experience,” he continued, “consists to a considerable degree in making choices and decisions. Christion Science acquaints the individual with the spiritual facts which enable him to judge and choose wisely and rightly. A person makes a right choice, he gives himself a Science treatment, when he embraces Life and renounces everything opposed to Life. When he recognises that Life is irrepressible, unconquerable, incorruptible. When he realises as best he cart that this resistless Life is his, that it is in full and unrestricted operation right where his infirmity may seem to be. Which means that the infirmity is not there, is not his, is not in. existence.” SPREAD OF SCIENCE. “Christian Science, discovered and founded by Mary Baker Eddy, has gone as widely abroad perhaps as has the Sermon on the Mount,” stated the speaker. “In other words it has permeated universal thought. There is hardly a person in western civilisation who is not'talking a different and a better language, who is not pursuing a different and a better life, who is not living in a different and a better world, because this great woman has lived and laboured here.” SCIENCE TREATMENT. “There is no mystery about Christian Science treatment,” explained the lecturer, “although the world abounds with people who, while they believe in Science, hesitate to voice: its truths because afraid of saying something erroneous. Any statement, any attitude, any mood which denounces disease as a lying imposition, and which exalts Life and health as everpresent realities, is scientific, 'is legitimate treatment. ■

“It is even reverent prayer, reverent in this that it absolves God from responsibility for sickness and suffering. I; is the sort of prayer which works a change in the individual. For the effect of prayer, after all, is not on God but on the man who prays. Such prayer unites the individual with that Life to which disease and age and dissolution are unknown. It unites him with that Mind which imparts to man all the intelligence he needs for success and usefulness. z “All down the centuries the belief has been entertained that man is material and mortal, whereas the fact is, as both reason and revelation inform us, man, truly, is spiritual and immortal. The individual who insists that man is mortal will be a mortal to all intents and purposes. “But when an individual stands up and intelligently and thankfully admits that man in the likeness of God is an immortal, an exhibit of Life to which restrictions and distresses are unknown, he enters that reverent mood which is prayer, he makes that rational argument which undermines the belief in disease, he administers that Science treatment which dissipates the mesmerism of mortality.”

PUTTING ASIDE SCEPTICISM. “Not a person should walk out of this auditorium the same person he was when he came in,” said Mr Ross in conclusion. “Each one of you should depart with more hope, strength, courage, and endurance than you had an hour ago. Many of you could well spare ten years of age’or ten pounds of weight. Why not allow these undesirables to dissipate and depart along with your aches and failures and loneliness? They are not actualities. They are deceptions. You can lose them all if you will suspend your unbelief long enough to permit the truths you are hearing to take lodgment in mentality. “It is not an easy thing for a person to revise his opinions, to subdue his prejudices, to waive his scepticism. It is so much easier to say: ‘These pronouncements are wonderful. They may be true of spiritual man but what have they to do with me?’ They have everything to do with you, for are you not in your genuine makeup a spiritual man? “Accept these precious gifts of the Almighty which hitherto you may have been putting aside. Yours is the life that does not come or age or fail or despair or sicken or fade out; yours is the life which by the grace of God is invincible.”* (Extended Report published by arrangement).