Editorial February 29, 1908 Issue

FUNDAMENTALS

John B. Willis

Pilate not only voiced the profoundest world-question, but he addressed the one person on the planet who could answer it. The terms of Jesus' reply may be spelled out of the glorious mosaic of his words and works, and it will be found that it bases the possibility of all true science and supplies the fundamental factors of all true faith.

Jesus' answer declares for Truth's oneness—it is God and His manifestation, the harmonious and all-inclusive realm of being, apart from which there is but falsity, nothingness. Men have not generally divined this. They have sensed an apparent conflict of forces, the incompatibility of good and evil; and the dualism of the Zoroastrians, the polytheism of the Greeks, thus became to them a logical sequence. Christian Science uncovers their mistake, as it will uncover all mistakes. They built upon the testimony of the material. They gave reality to the unideal, and even Christian theology has not escaped their consequent confusion. Nevertheless, the answer of the Nazarene forever stands, and it is supported both by the testimony of reason and of nature, so far as we apprehend it. There is but one arithmetic, one kind of intelligence, one order of logical thought, one right idea, one man,—there is but Truth and its infinite manifestation, and the mature world is rapidly recognizing that this alone is thinkable. "The Lord our God is one Lord." This is the supreme declaration of the Hebrew consciousness, it is the fundamental teaching of Christ Jesus, and this realization is made possible to-day in the proof supplied us through Christian Science of the nothingness of all that is unlike God.

Jesus' answer declares also for the continuity of revelation, Truth's unfoldment in individual consciousness. The possibility of such unfoldment inheres in the fact of man's likeness to God, its necessity in the fact that we have not yet attained to the Christ consciousness. This thought of Truth has always been an offense to many; it has awakened a cry of alarm from ecclesiasticism, which is still echoed by the supporters of "sacred authority." "It encourages," they say, "that individualism which becomes presumptuous, irreverent, and anarchistic. It conduces to that multiplicity and confusion of opinions which is the bane of Protestantism."

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