"Weird Cult"

"When our friends pass from our sight and we lament, that lamentation is needless and causeless.

"The corpse, deserted by thought, is cold and decays, but it never suffers."—Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Eddy in Science & Health.

At Lake Hopatcong, N. J. one day last week, one Charles Emerson Berton, 20, dived into shallow water, fractured his neck. For the next two days the Bertons, Christian Scientists, kept their son in their summer bungalow. Then they took him to Ten Acres Sanitarium near Princeton, only authorized Christian Science institution in New Jersey. There, next day, Charles Berton "passed from sight."

The case of Charles Berton interested township police. An investigation began. Meanwhile County Physician Charles H. Mitchell grew angry indeed. Said he:

"It is outrageous that such weird cult practices should be permitted in the heart of civilization. On all sides there were available the facilities of advanced science that could have saved his life, and yet this boy was allowed to die without medical treatment. . . . Mrs. MacDonald, the head nurse, told me that they had no history of the case, did not even so much as know what was wrong with the boy and made no effort to find out. She told me they put him to rest in bed, gave him whatever liquid nourishment he was able to swallow, and trusted in God and prayer. It's a case of gross ignorance or insanity, I don't know which. . . . It is an outrage against civilization."

But the case of Charles Berton was more complicated than that. Father Berton, although a firm Christian Scientist, said he had walked three miles for a doctor who treated his son for lacerations of the scalp. The doctor, said Father Berton, had offered little hope: the son was "physically dead but mentally alive." Ten Acres Sanitarium was chartered only to receive patients with mild disorders. Acute cases were not to be admitted. Yet two doctors were supposed to be on call. Authorities said that a doctor was called only after Charles Berton died. The Sanitarium's license was suspended pending investigation.

Officially the Christian Science Church could not be held to account. Wrote shrewd Mary Baker Eddy in Science & Health: ''Until the advancing age admits the efficacy and supremacy of Mind, it is better for Christian Scientists to leave surgery and the adjustments of broken bones and dislocations to the fingers of a surgeon, while the mental healer confines himself chiefly to mental reconstruction and to the prevention of inflammation. Christian Science is always the most skillful surgeon, but surgery is the branch of its healing which will be last acknowledged. However, it is but just to say that the author has already in her possession well-authenticated records of the cure, by herself and her students through mental surgery alone, of broken bones. . . ."*