Editorial November 16, 1907 Issue

THE IMMUTABILITY OF LAW

John B. Willis

Every thoughtful student of nature is impressed with its contradictory aspects. He notes a thousand things that witness to its apparent disorderliness, the absence of law, while at the same time he grows ever more and more sure that beneath and behind the surface of things there is the reign of law. and this last impression will steadily increase as he follows the "stars in their courses" and acquaints himself with the secrets of the microscope and the test-tube.

Given the sense of a sovereign and unvarying law, and the parting of the ways for human philosophy and life is at once and inevitably presented by the fact that each individual identifies such law either with matter or with Spirit. The predispositions of mortal sense favor the former course, and in all ages most men have entertained materialistic concepts of nature and of man. To-day these concepts are centered in the theory of evolution, which strangely enough, while standing for an immutability of material law that necessitates the denial of its possible annulment even by so exalted a being as Christ Jesus, still finds it necessary to explain the multiplied forms of so-called organic life by assuming a variability in the governing law which is entirely out of keeping with the original concept of its immutability! Indeed Mr. Darwin's explanation of the origin of species demands such a determinative variation for its beginnings as would lead one to think that those who have accepted it would explain Jesus' miraculous works to be the result of this variation of law, instead of assuming the serious difficulties involved in the denial of the truth of the Gospel narratives. Furthermore, most evolutionists recognize the unique and supreme character of Christ Jesus as the ideal man, such a being as, in the unvarying order of a law of evolution, would have appeared not when he did, but as the consummate fact of the order. Both in its beginning, therefore, and in its highest product current evolutionary philosophy contradicts that sense of the immutability of law which has led them to laugh to scorn both the miracle and the miracle worker!

The contrast to all this, which is presented in the teaching of Christ Jesus and of Christian Science, by the identification of law with Spirit, is fundamental and absolute. Here the immutability of law inheres in the fact that it is the manifestation of divine Principle, from the immediate activities of which it is never separated even in thought. This divine Principle is infinite Truth, whose activities can never be expressed in untruth; infinite good, whose activities can never be expressed in evil. The seeming, manifestations of energy for ill as well as for good, which characterize the material law of human belief, are forever impossible to him whom Jesus defined as Love, and hence in Christian Science the thought of immutability naturally and necessarily associates itself only with the law of Love's manifestations.

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