100 YEARS AGO IN THE SARATOGIAN

Sunday, March 24, 1918. Christian Scientists are “doing their full share in the great war” to say the least, a church representative tells a Saratoga Springs audience today.

Frank Bell, a member of the church’s Board of Lectureship, tells a Masonic Temple gathering of over 400 people that Christian Scientists have been “spared much of the mental burden of the times by reason of the effect of their religion in dissolving doubt and allaying fear.”

While the horrors of modern war had led some Christians to doubt God’s benevolence long before the U.S. joined the conflict last April, Bell explains that a Christian Scientist in wartime “did not have to lower his concept of Deity by assenting to the wicked theory that a righteous God must needs use evil to accomplish good, nor stupefy his spiritual sense with that discreditable substitute for straightforward thinking, the familiar theological narcotic that the ways of providence are inscrutable.”

In general, “successful resistance to evil requires a knowledge of what evil is and how it can be met and mastered at its source.” For instance, “the evil called disease is the outward expression or effect of a mental state” and can be “healed by treatment applied solely to mental conditions.”

In peacetime, Bell says, businessmen will find solutions to their business problems in Christian Science, “provided they are willing to give up trying to gain seemingly worthwhile ends by means of wrong acts.”

On a larger scale, “When the Christianity that is Christian Science is practiced universally, war will be no more because fear and hate, lust and greed, superstition and false theology, phases of wrong thinking that promote and permit war, will have been deprived of their claim to dominion over man, and the supremacy of natural good will have been demonstrated in the affairs of nations.”

The Saratogian describes Bell as “a very earnest and pleasing speaker [who] impressed his hearers with his intense sincerity.”