The doctrine that pain and death are not real at all, except in so far as their victims are cowardly enough to submit to them, is a diabolical doctrine, obviously calculated to produce all the purely diabolical qualities, such as intellectual cruelty and contempt for the weak. . . . Christ came on earth to smash the man who felt himself strong. And He did, in the most effective and final manner, smash the man who felt himself strong; for He opposed to him the God who felt Himself weak. Human beings henceforward were not to be humiliated by the limitations of pain and death; for Deity itself has admitted them. Christian Science says that pain is not a reality. Christianity says that pain is so great a reality that even the Creator could feel it. Christian Science says that a man need not think of death at all. Christianity says that even God thought of it with awe. Marred by a million other mistakes, betrayed and tortured through the agony of eighteen centuries, Christianity has never lost its strongest and most distinctive note, the physical note; the talk of the body and the blood. Ever since the Crucifixion a certain actuality, and, therefore, a certain sanctity, has clung round the hard pain of prosaic men.
-April 11, 1908, Daily News
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