ment may screen a dozen in which
nothing happened at all.

For Christian Science has in this region two alibis which can always be
brought into action, the most perfect ever devised. If it fails to cure
it is either because the one who was not cured lacked faith, or because
of the erroneous belief of some one else. A system which believes that
the toxic effect of poisons depends upon the vote of the majority in
that arsenic will cease to be a poison when everybody ceases to think of
it as a poison and will be a poison as long as anybody believes it is,
is perfectly safe even if it should fail to cure a case of arsenical
poison, for until facts and experience cease to weigh at all there will
always be some one somewhere believing that arsenic is a poison and that
one will be the scapegoat for the system.

_As a Religion it is Strongest in Teaching That God Has Meaning for the
Whole of Life_

Christian Science is, however, more than a system of mental
therapeutics, it is also a religion and due allowance must be made in
any just appraisal of it for the way in which it has made religion real
to many for whom religion had ceased to have a working reality. It needs
to be said on one side that a good deal of Christian Science religion is
really taking the Ark of God to battle, using religion, that is, for
comfort, material prosperity, health and just such tangible things. But
Christian Science meets a demand of the time also just here. Our own
age, deeply entangled in material satisfactions, has no mind to postpone
the satisfactions of religion to a future life. The monk and, indeed,
the generality of the devout in the medieval Church sought in
self-limited earthly joy a proper discipline for the soul and a state in
contrast to which the felicities for which they paid so great a price
should be the more welcome. The devout of Mary Baker Eddy's time, though
inclined to find in material well-being a plain mark of divine favour,
none the less accepted sickness and sorrow as from the hand of God and
prayed that with a meek and lowly heart they might endure this fatherly
correction and, having learned obedience by the things they suffered,
have a place amongst those who, through faith and patience, inherit His
presence.

But our own time is not so eager to inherit promises as to enter into
possession. A religion which does not demonstrate itself in actual
well-being is under suspicion. The social passion now much in evidence