EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.
O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called.—1 Tim. 6, 20.
O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called.—1 Tim. 6, 20.
Everything in this world is liable to be spoiled. There is nothing safe against the doings of corruption. The holiest things are often perverted, the richest flowers blasted in their bud. Man himself, as the Psalmist tells us, was made but a little lower than the angels, but his glory was soon tarnished, and he frequently sinks a little lower than the brute. There is none, though he appear as a veritable saint among men, who is beyond the reach of danger. And it is so also with religion.
Beautiful as is religion, and pure as it is, coming from the mind and bosom of God, it is liable to be spoiled in the hands and hearts of its professors. Such at least is the teaching of the text and the testimony of experience. Just like the crystal mountain stream in its course from the virgin spring down to the ocean gathers some of the unclean and filthy deposits of the shores it washes, so the waves of religion, in flowing through many lands and hearts, have taken up some of their noxious and poisonous ingredients; while purifying and refreshing theearth, the noble river contracts some of its corruptions. The Jews, for instance, had a pure religion, communicated to them by the patriarchs and prophets, but heathenish elements were continually mingling with it. Moloch and other hideous idols would now and then stand in the very presence of Jehovah's temple, and the priests of Baal oft took the place of the sons of Aaron. When Christ came, the Jewish religion was exceedingly tainted and corrupted with Gentileism and other defiling influences. The Christian religion in its turn has fared no better, starting out on the pure basis of its divine Master's directions; but it has been subject to the same influences. It was given to the world as a plain, simple system. But when kings and emperors began to take it into favor, magnificent outward ceremonies were instituted, privileged orders were appointed; bishops and other high authorities were set up, claiming extraordinary power, and at last what started as Christianity became little more than baptized heathenism. Masses, penances, and confessionals took the stead of Christ and His righteousness. In place of the old heathen gods were placed patron saints. Venus of the Greeks became Mary of the Christians. The true glory of the Church was gone, until God in His mercy turned back the tide to His own Revelation and Book, the Holy Bible. That was in the days of the Lutheran Reformation. But that did not settle matters; the soil of misguided religion and of man's perverted opinion has been defiling, and is still defiling, its pure and holy waters. It need not be. Christianity is as simple as simplicity can be, its teaching is as clear as is the sunlight in its noonday radiancy; but, of course, it must be guarded, protected against corruption on the part of man's delirious and sickly reason.
This is the caution St. Paul makes in our text to his beloved pupil Timothy, when he directs him: "O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called, which some professing have erred concerning the faith." There are two classes of science falsely so called that have erred concerning the faith. The one is the worldly science, and the other the Christian Science, and concerning both classes I would ask for your most careful attention.
When speaking of science, it must be observed at the outset that true science and the Revelation of God are not at variance.How can they be? The Book of Nature and the Book of Religion have been written by one and the same Hand, and cannot contradict each other. What man by investigation can find out in nature cannot be of a character to make him doubt or deny the truthfulness of religion as laid down in the Bible. But this is what some of the men of supposed higher learning are doing. They look askance at religion. They shake their wise heads, and, putting on their eye-glasses, superciliously state that the Bible is not what people think it is. They are willing to admit that it is a book of much good history, a book of sublime poetry, a book of excellent moral precepts, a book which admirably describes human nature, a book from which all men may gather a great deal of practical wisdom and comforting promise, but many of its texts are spurious or faulty, it is not altogether up to date in their opinion. The geologist has bored into the earth, and found that the various compositions must make it much older than Moses seems to say. The astronomer has put his telescope into the heavens and finding our planet, the earth, the smallest among heavenly bodies, considers it too insignificant to be the object of all that divine concern the Bible speaks about. The anatomist has examined the skulls of dead men, and comparing the one with the other, questions whether they have all proceeded from one human pair. The natural historian has never found a race of snakes with power of speech, and so he puts down the account of the serpent in Eden as a myth. The people of the earth speak hundreds of languages, and hence it must be a mere dream that there was once a time when "the whole earth was of one language and one speech." Miracles, they say, are so contrary to the general experience of mankind that they must be rejected as falsehood and fiction, and thus might we continue to give the objections of these wiseacres, called scientists, who are looked up to with undisguised admiration by numbers. It would lead us too far, though nothing might afford us greater pleasure to examine these objections in their true light.—We will only ask, How do these wise people know what length of time it took the almighty God to form the various strata which compose the crust of the earth? How can they tell that this world of ours is too small to engage Jehovah so deeply for its welfare? How can they prove that the human race and language do not extend back to one common stock? How dare they deny the credibility of miracles in the face of themany wonders which are spread about them every day, and appear every season in their sight? What authority have they for their high-sounding, but hollow assertions? They think themselves wise, but in fact they are but babes in these matters, and those who follow them are their senseless dupes.
The truth is that with all the advances of knowledge which have so wonderfully marked the last three hundred years, searching heaven and earth and sea, knocking at every door and gathering wisdom from every source, there has not come to light one truth to contradict these holy records, or to require the relinquishment of one word in all the great volume of God. Only a few instances to prove what I state. It has been but a few years since Newton laid open the laws of gravitation, and yet the Scriptures spoke of the earth being hung "upon nothing," as if familiar with the whole subject, before human science had begun to form even the feeblest guesses in the case. Again, take the theory of wind currents, and of the circulation of the blood, why, read the 1st, 6th and 12th chapters of Ecclesiastes, and observe where Solomon describes it at least 2,500 years ago. And so in every case. You may lack understanding or research, you may fail to grasp its truth, by reason of its being too wonderful to you, but as far as being false and spurious, let no man dare to raise that charge against God's religion and Book. Our wisdom, at best, is only fragmentary, as St. Paul says, "We know only in part." No man, not even a scientist, is the personification of all wisdom, and ought not so consider himself. Let every man be a liar, but never accuse God's truthfulness. Avoid such, as St. Paul says in our text, as being profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called.
This, then, as much as worldly science is concerned, and now let us turn to the other species which calls itself Christian Science, but which is neither Christian nor Science,—not Christian, because it has erred from the faith, as our text puts it, and not a science, because, to quote our text again, it is falsely so called. It might be well to approach the matter more closely. In the first place, it must be noted that Christian Science is nothing new; it is, to be candid, a rehash of what is termed in Church History, Gnosticism. In the early Christian Church, about the year 200 after Christ, there arose certain heretics, Montanus and his prophetesses Maximilla and Priscilla, who advocated theories and things similar to those in our days advanced withso much zealousness by the late Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy, the founder and high priestess of the Church of Christian Scientists. These heretical views referred to also found adherents in the early Church, so that the excellent Bishop Irenaeus, of Lyons, wrote a book against them called, "The Refutation of Christian Science falsely so called." Mrs. Eddy very deftly succeeded in bolstering up these ancient opinions, and launched them forth in the various editions of her book called "Science and Health, with a Key to the Scriptures." I have carefully gone over that book, and I confess I am overwhelmed with shame to think that any one who lays claim to Christianity or to well-balanced reason can earnestly believe such matter. To mention only a few of her doctrines:—The Bible says 1 John 5, 7: "There are three that bear record in heaven: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one." Mrs. Eddy says: "The theory of three persons in the Godhead reminds us of heathen gods." In other words, she stamps the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as heathenish. The Bible says, Rom. 5, 12: "By one man sin entered into the world and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." Mrs. Eddy calls this an "illusion," purely imaginary; there is no such thing as death. Naturally, then, in line with this, she also rejects Christ's redeeming us from sin, stating that the time is not distant when these common views about Christ's redemption will undergo a great change. In other words, while she mentions Christ's name with seemingly the greatest reverence in her book, she calls Him a fraud and deceiver, because the Bible tells us in just these words that Christ came to save His people from their sins, came to destroy the works of the devil, came to redeem them that were under the Law. But Mrs. Eddy spurns the existence of a personal devil, denies the existence of sin, and rejects redemption. Such passages as 1 John 1, 7: "The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanseth us from all sin," are "hideous" to her. Her entire system is nothing else than unchristian bosh. I say "unchristian" because, on closer investigation, there is not a single particle of Christian doctrine and belief that she does not openly or indirectly at least overthrow. It is true, she claims "faith in the Bible"; the title of her book is, "Science and Health, with a Key to the Scriptures," but it is a key that binds, but does not unlock. Her comment to the very first verse of the Scripture: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,"is this: "This creation consists in the developing of spiritual ideas and their identities, which are grasped and reflected by the unending Spirit." That may be Mrs. Eddy's creation of the world, but it certainly was not the creation which the first chapter of Genesis tells us about.
But let us go on to the second chapter of the Bible. This does not suit Mrs. Eddy, as she expressly states it is diametrically opposed to scientific truth, and "inspired by falsehood and error," and in consequence she rejects the second chapter of Genesis entirely. We could go on at this rate, but enough has been shown to characterize Mrs. Eddy's "Key to the Scriptures." And alas! that men should be carried away with such barefaced craftiness and such thick-coated and consummate falsehood! Oh, may it teach us to love to study our Bible!
But there is still another phase of Christian Science of which we must speak, would we do it justice, and that is the healing phase. Mrs. Eddy claims that she has restored the sick and brought back the dying to life. "Science and Health" and our community have been repeatedly agitated by specimens of this healing ability. It is well known to every one that Christian Science in its treatment of disease starts from the fundamental theory that there is no sickness and disease, as it says in their text-book, "Science and Health": "You call it neuralgia; this is all delusion, imagination. You expose your body to a certain temperature, and your delusion says that you catch a cold or get catarrh. But such is not the case; it is only the effect of your imagination." The consequence of this fallacy is that no medical remedies are resorted to; in fact, to a Christian Scientist ignorance of medicine is bliss. Mrs. Eddy warns against a knowledge of medicine as a hindrance to learning her system.
Stopping here for a moment to show the unscripturalness of all this, I would but briefly call your attention to such passages as Is. 38 and 2 Kings 20, where we read: "And Isaiah, the prophet of the Lord, said to Hezekiah the King, Let them take a lump of figs and lay it for a plaster upon the boil, and he shall recover." Or, turning to an instance from the New Testament, St. Paul the Apostle writes in 1 Tim. 5, 23 to his afflicted pupil: "Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities," thus suggesting a medicinal tonic or medicine. Our Lord approved of physicians when He said: "They that be whole," that is, healthy, "need not aphysician," which evidently implies that the sick do need a physician, and we know from Col. 4, 14 that there was a physician among the first disciples of the Christian Church, and that was none other than the man who wrote the third and the fifth book in the New Testament, namely, St. Luke. It says in Col. 4, 14: "Luke, the beloved physician, greets you." And moreover, when we read that in the days of His flesh the sick and the palsied and the lame, and those afflicted otherwise, came to Jesus and He healed them, does not Christian Science, denying that there is no sickness, no palsy, and no disease, brand our Lord as a liar and a fraud? God protect us from such abomination!
But let us come to the final question: By what power or remedy does Christian Science heal, or, rather, claim to heal? Answer: By denying the existence of matter, of sickness, of death, and by seeking to give the mind complete mastery. Just imagine it is not so! Prayer is employed, but Mrs. Eddy does not attach as much importance to that as some of her followers, and from what we have heard, such prayer is not the prayer of faith, for she has far erred from God and the faith. God certainly does not answer such vain and profane babbling of lips that speak falsehood and lies. The whole Christian Science is a blustering, high-strung delusion. St. Paul gives a true characterization of it 2 Thess. 2, 9: "It is after the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish."
God grant that we may "avoid profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called." With our hearts firmly grounded in the simple truth as it is in Jesus, and laid down in the Volume before us, let us hold fast through God's grace what we have. It is the power, the only power, unto salvation. Amen.