Article October 21, 1905 Issue

The Wrong Road and the Right

HON. CLARENCE A. BUSKIRK.

Can a wrong road lead to a right end?

Although the negative answer to this question is as indisputably self-evident as would be the folly of expecting to reach Chicago by means of a train which is going directly away from it, yet the history of human thinking discloses that somehow many intelligent men and women have always been cudgeling their reasoning faculties for the purpose of convincing themselves that an affirmative answer to this question is frequently the correct one, after all, and a brief consideration of some of the errors which have thus crept into popular opinion and thought may be useful.

Probably the most serious of these errors is the theological concept that God has taken the wrong road to attain a right result, by directly or indirectly creating sin, sickness, suffering, death, as instrumentalities of good. Various persuasive phrases have been coined as the currency by means of which this theological dogma gets more easily into circulation and acceptance. One of these phrases, for example, is the one so frequently heard, "The mysterious dispensation of divine Providence." The chain of reasoning leading to this erroneous theological concept, that God is the author of evil, is made up of the following chief links: that God is all-powerful and the creator of all that is, and that (of which sin, sickness, suffering, death are forms) is a real existence; therefore, God created evil. If the two premises in this syllogism be admitted to be true, the deduction that God is the author of evil is inevitable, Hence, the fault of the syllogism, if it be untrue, must be found in one or both of its premises. If either premise be false the syllogistic deduction is thereby falsified just the same as if both premises were false. The fault in the syllogism we are considering is the premise that evil is a real existence. It is easy, in a survey of human thinking, to perceive how this false premise, that evil is a real existence, has been so largely accepted. It has come through the failure to distinguish between appearances and reality. This failure has been a prolific source of error in human thinking. Take one very familiar example: For ages men believed that the sun rose in the east and set in the west, because it appeared to do so, and a prison immediately gaped for the discoverer who announced that this appearance was not true. It required the passing of several generations before the masses of mankind were willing to reject the daily appearance that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west as unreal. The truth respecting it needed to be demonstrated thousands upon thousands of times through scores upon scores of years before popular incredulity began even to abate, or "the pointed bayonets" of ridicule (which is always most severely dogmatic when most densely ignorant) to be turned aside. Other salient examples will readily occur to the reader, and show how frequently and how stubbornly popular opinion has accepted false appearances for truth or reality.

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