Page:Medicine and the church.djvu/95

 boy is very seriously ill:" and I explained the nature of his complaint. Still confidently smiling, the practitioner replied, "We have had worse cases than this." I told her the best medical advice had been taken, and the doctors had all given the boy up. Upon which the lady remarked, with gentle emphasis, "God has not given him up." That of course was conclusive, and I left her to do her best. I went away at ten o'clock, and then the Scientist seated herself by the patient, read to him from the Bible and Mrs. Eddy's book, and exhorted him in some such language as this: "You must not think you are ill, my dear little boy. You are not ill: you can't be ill. God would not make you ill. He made all things good, but not illness"—and so on, and so on. The boy, I am told, heard her patiently but wearily, and at one-thirty he died. Then the practitioner gathered up her books and papers and went away, and that is the end of the story.'

Here we have Christian Science in a favourable light: all the same, it is not a pleasant picture, these falsehoods told to a dying child. If it be not true that God 'makes illness,' and if it be not true that God 'gives us up,' then I attach no meaning at all to that Name.

Let us put ourselves at that point of the