lt from the devil, but merely from natural causes. Such a definition
does not fit into the modern system. To-day from a really religious
point of view, both groups of diseases must be acknowledged to be
natural or with Mrs. Eddy, as the work of the unholy spirit. Christian
Science is indeed by far more consistent. If the cure results through
the meaning and value of religion, there is no reason whatever why
cancer and diphtheria and paralysis should not be cured as well as
psychasthenia. And if, on the other hand, organic diseases cannot be
cured because the psychophysical process of the religious emotion has no
influence over diphtheria bacilli, then the whole process is removed to
the causal sphere and it is acknowledged that the purposive meaning of
religion is not in question at all. The whole system of such religious
psychotherapeutics is therefore in its inner structure contradictory. It
contains causal and purposive elements without any possibility of
unifying them. They are loosely mixed, and the power of prayer means on
one page something entirely different from what it means on another. In
these respects Christian Science is by far more unified and in harmony
with itself; its therapeutics is really anchored in a system.

From a scientific point of view, its dangerousness is of course much
greater inasmuch as it extends its methods over every organic disease
and thus applies merely psychical treatment where from a standpoint of
scientific medicine, physical treatment would be absolutely necessary.
Moreover its philosophy is after all only a pseudophilosophy; its
tempting equations of disease and error and sin and unreality are
ultimately a mere playing with conceptions. If we were to point to the
root of the misunderstanding in Christian Science, we should say that
everything depends on the philosophical commonplace that the objects
with which we deal in our life are ideas and that our whole experience
is mind. "Christian Science reveals incontrovertibly that Mind is
All-in-All, that the only realities are the divine mind and idea." But
now silently this mental character of the real world is identified with
the mental experience which stands in contrast to the physical
experience. There results the impression that physical experience
therefore, does not belong to the world of reality. It is evident,
however, that mental in contrast to physical means something entirely
different from mental in the philosophical s