one reason and
another, heretofore questioned it and they have discovered in this
new-found sense of God's love and presence, a reality and wealth of
religious experience which they had never known before.

_It Exalts the Power of Mind But Ignores Too Largely the Processes by
Which Mind Realizes Its Ideals_

There is also in Christian Science practice and philosophy the
apprehension of a real truth which New Thought formulates much more
clearly. Mind is creative. (Not alone mind with a capital "M" but our
own every-day, human, small "m" mind.) The trouble is that Christian
Science hopelessly short-circuits the creative process. Our human world
is finally what we make it through our insight, our understanding and
above all by our sense of values, but the actual achievement of changed
purposes in a changed world is a process whose immensity is not even so
much as hinted at in "Science and Health." Christian Science too largely
ignores and seems commonly to deny the whole disciplinary side of life
with its inevitable accompaniment of failure, fault and pain. Pain is no
delusion; pain is the sign of something gone wrong in the great business
of normal physical life. Nor is sin only an unreality which "seems real
to human erring belief"; sin is a sign that something has gone wrong in
the struggle for a normal, disciplined, moral life. Nor is the whole
body of evil simply a shadow to be dismissed as easily as one turns
one's back upon some darkness and faces toward the light; evil is the
sign of something gone wrong, or something not yet attained in the
massive progress of a humanity which combines in itself so many
discordant elements, which has so long a way to go and so much to learn
and so many things to conquer as it struggles upward toward a happier
state.

Christian Science cannot in the end be true to the great facts of
experience, which have a power beyond the force of any assertion to
countervail, unless it is false to Mary Baker Eddy's philosophy, nor can
it be true to its philosophy without impoverishing moral and spiritual
endeavour. It is hard to find a place in the system--taken rigidly--for
sympathy or tenderness or the richest of human qualities, or for those
elements of wealth in character contributed by pain bravely borne or
sorrow uncomplainingly accepted. There is little place in Christian
Science for the Beatitudes and less still for that fine courage which is
itself the one assured victory which t