d a religion.

VII

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AS A SYSTEM OF HEALING AND A RELIGION

Christian Science practice is the application of its philosophy and
theology to bodily healing. This is really the end toward which the
whole system is directed. "Science and Health" is an exposition of Mrs.
Eddy's system as a healing force. Her philosophy and theology are
incidental, or--if that is not a fair statement--they both condition and
are conditioned by her system of healing. There is hardly a page in her
book without its reference to sickness and health. Her statements are
consequently always involved and one needs to stand quite back from them
to follow their outline. Here, as elsewhere, one may read deeply and
indirectly between the lines attitudes and beliefs against which she is
reacting. Her reactions against the environment of her girlhood and
early womanhood affect her point of view so distinctly that without the
recognition of this a good deal of what she says is a puzzle without a
key.

_Christian Science the Application of Philosophy and Theology to Bodily
Healing_

She had been taught, among other things, that sickness is a punishment
for sin. One may safely assume this for the theology of her formative
period fell back upon this general statement in its attempt to reconcile
individual suffering and special providence. One ought not justly to say
that Mrs. Eddy ever categorically affirms that she had been taught this,
or as categorically denies the truth of it, but there are statements--as
for example page 366--which seem to imply that she is arguing against
this and directing her practitioners how to meet and overcome it. This
perhaps accounts for the rather difficult and wavering treatment of sin
and sickness in a connection where logically sickness alone should be
considered.

Mrs. Eddy would not naturally have thus associated sin and sickness had
they not been associated for her in earlier teaching and yet, as has
been said, all this is implicit rather than explicit. The key to a great
deal in "Science and Health" is not in what the author says, but in the
reader's power to discover behind her statements what she is "writing
down." Her system is both denial and affirmation. In the popular
interpretation of it quite as much is made of denial and the recognition
of error as of its more positive aspects, but in the book there is a
pretty constant interweaving of both the denial of evil and the
affirmatio