The Right Thought of God

The significance of the relation of our concept of Deity to our spiritual life was forcibly expressed by Emerson in his famous "divinity address" when he said, "The doctrine of the divine nature being forgotten, a sickness infests and dwarfs the constitution."

To entertain the least error is to court disability, but to cherish a false sense of God is to yield our thought to the influence of an all-pervasive blight, and hazard the shipwreck of all faith. The realization of this fact gives special interest to the comments of the religious press respecting the late Slocum and Norge disasters, for they go to show that while many have entirely given up the traditional thought of the divine relation to these dreadful events, others still cling to a view which would do credit to the vigorous old-time declarations of God's responsibility for evil, and His utilization thereof.

Long ago John Wesley said, "Calvin's God is my devil." Nevertheless a religious periodical which stands for his views, in referring to the first meeting of the tearful remnant of St. Mark's congregation, speaks of the fitness of their use of a hymn which attributes our afflictive experiences to God's "unerring "God hath done it and He only can explain." This seems to be the final word respecting these things, with unnumbered earnest Christian preachers as well as laymen, and the larger influence of such a thought may explain the fact that, in this twentieth century, books and periodicals are being issued, whose avowed object is to "emancipate men" from what is termed "the degrading belief in a God" who can institute an order of things that results in the unspeakable torture of innocent infancy and helpless age, and who, as instanced in these late horrors remains indifferent to their piteous and agonizing cry. One such anti-Christian journal before us dwells upon the teaching of some religionists regarding these events, and speaks with undisguised contempt of the worship of God of the type disclosed.

The retention of an unworthy concept of Deity by a rapidly advancing race, may be explained, in part, by the peculiar hesitaion of Christian people to indulge any spirit of inquiry regarding the subject; a far more significant reason, however, is found in the fact that a degraded and degrading sense of God inevitably attaches to the belief in the reality of evil. The moral sense of the world protests that the life-destroying holocaust is an abnormity and a wrong, and so long as a Christian faith stands for the substance and eternality of the so-called laws which eventuate in these tragedies, and declares them to be the expression of divine purpose, so long will the worship of inconsistency, with all its attendant ills, continue.

Over against all this sense of God, Christian Science teaches that He "is universal, eternal, divine Love, which changeth not and sendeth no evil and no sin upon man," and that He cannot "punish man for doing what He created him capable of doing, and knew from the outset that he would do" (Science and Health, pp. 140. 357). This does not encourage the presumption that would venture beyond what has been demonstrated, but it does counsel a glad acceptance of the larger apprehension of the meaning of Jesus' assurance that we may know God and find in this knowing "eternal life,"—"expand to the full circle of the universe." Christian Science dares to question the consistency and practical value of traditional ideas of God, and to discard those which are out of keeping with the teaching of the Master, however venerated they may have come to be, and this daring is both its offence and its glory. Either the belief in the reality of evil or in the Christ ideal of the divine perfection and lovableness must be given up, and in the presence of this issue Christian Science takes its stand unequivocably for perfectness of our God.

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The Protection of Spiritual Law

August 13, 1904

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