Editorial October 8, 1904 Issue

The Extinction of Evil

Believers in Christian Science are frequently asked to explain their continued adherence to its teaching after they have been healed by it. Outsiders fail to find a sufficient reason for the changed views of their friends or relatives who have accepted Christian Science, and they argue that it is surely enough to make the usual return for the practitioner's services, and let the incident end there. The one who has been healed has, however, a very different view of the situation. If the spiritual sense has been awakened, which is usually the case as a result of Christian Science treatment, the beneficiary is impelled to inquire with the Psalmist, "byline" He has a deep sense of gratitude to divine Love, a desire to atone for past wrongdoing, to aid others that they may gain an understanding of the truth which has healed him, and which offers to all mankind protection from sin and sickness. He has learned in this experience that wrong thinking was responsible for his past suffering, however much it may have been induced by current belief, and as he gains right views of God and man from the Bible and our text-book, he learns that he must put them into practice. He learns that obedience to spiritual law brings freedom, and he also finds that he is no longer compelled to obey the supposed laws of mortal belief which would restrict mental unfoldment, but can never advance it.

In "Miscellaneous Writings," page 33, our Leader briefly but forcefully explains some of the advantages of Christian Science healing over material methods, and we find in all her writings the inevitable inference that evil must finally disappear before a perfect understanding of Truth. It is seldom claimed that material remedies give immunity from disease, much less are we led to look for its entire extinction from human experience. This is, however, the hope of all Christian Scientists, who say with St. Paul, "and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us." What may not the "love of God" do for man?"

In one of the delicately suggestive essays of "Elia," we find the fairy queen, Titania, pleading with old Father Time who had threatened to obliterate her race. She is aware of an ancient prophecy that "the date of fairy existence should be then extinct when men should cease to believe in them." We smile at this as a pretty conceit, and yet from the days of the learned Greeks down to a comparatively recent time, superstition has peopled the groves and streams of every land with the embodiments of fancy which were to be supplicated or appeased in order to avert misfortune and secure health and prosperity. It is true that men have ceased to believe in such myths, but we may well ask whether the "scientific deductions" of the modern laboratory and dissecting room are helping to emancipate the race from the fearsome beliefs of sin, disease, and death, any more than did these superstitions of a bygone day?

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