Editorial October 28, 1905 Issue

An Aspect of Error

John B. Willis

Error is always error and never becomes truth or truthful. It belongs wholly to false mortal sense and disappears only as this sense disappears. This distinguishing feature of all falsity is sadly forgotten or ignored among men, many of whom overlook the fact that its least increment is wholly unlike truth, that no subdivision of falsity can make it other than false. It is smitten in its "babes and sucklings," just as surely and unhesitatingly by truth, as it is smitten in its "strong men and cattle." The willingness to tell a fib has been regarded as an entirely different thing from the disposition to tell a lie, and a little bit of that which would be promptly condemned in bulk, is often clung to as though it were not only desirable but necessary. This human tendency is revealed to-day in the effort of many who have broken away from the hard and fast dogmatism of Miltonic theology, and who are trying to escape the incubus of matter by etherealizing it. They are ready and glad to part with the hard lump which they have believed to be a divinely provided basis for the activities of Spirit, but they hold tenaciously to a highly attenuated form of the same old stuff, as a medium for the transmission of mental forces.

In distinct contrast to all this thought and endeavor, Christian Science teaches that "the higher stratum of mortal mind is more potent to injure than its lower substratum, matter," "The more material the belief, the more obvious its error, until divine Spirit, supreme in its domain, dominates all matter." (Science and Health, pp. 198, 97.)

We can no more escape from material sense by its refinement or sublimation than we can from immoral habits by their indulgence in an artistic atmosphere, for the less repulsive error is made, the more seductive and deceiving it becomes. Christian Science makes it clear that the essence of materialism is belief in the reality of that which is not spiritual, — which does not manifest Life, Truth, and Love. The materiality of human sense does not depend upon the kind of material substance it posits as the so-called basis of natural phenomena, much less upon the size or mobility of the atoms of which this substance is supposed to be composed. Furthermore, it is manifest that the statement of material beliefs in high-sounding terms and polished phraseology in no wise renders them less opposed to the spiritual interpretation of the universe, or less incompatible with the divine idealism of Christian Science. The two orders of thought are inherently contradictory to each other, and there can be neither co-operation nor companionship between them.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Editorial

Feeding the Hungry