Article April 25, 1908 Issue

Christian Science is the effort to make the teaching...

Frederick Dixon

Kensington (England) News

Christian Science is the effort to make the teaching of Jesus as practical in the twentieth century as it was in the first, and it must be remembered that the practice of Christianity in the first century applied not only to the broad question of human progress, but to every minutiæ of human existence. The ministry of Jesus was to a very great extent a ministry of physical healing, but that physical healing, though it demonstrated the power of the Christ to destroy disease and pain, was only a means to a far greater end, of attesting, as Mrs. Eddy has written on page 150 of Science and Health, "the higher mission of the Christ-power to take away the sins of the world." Jesus himself made this perfectly clear. "Believe me," he said, "that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works' sake."

It is obvious that healing established on such a basis can only operate by destroying the cause, the belief of evil as a power in the human consciousness. This is something very different from the mere diversion of human thought into another channel, which may be accomplished without affecting the belief of the patient in the power of sin or evil, and so still leave him a prey to all the resultants of such a belief. Jesus, who anticipated every cry of humanity for spiritual light, referred to this when he said, "If I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you." The kingdom of God never came upon any man by mental suggestion, which Jesus himself described in the same breath as "a house divided against itself." Jesus said, "A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit." The deduction from this is perfectly clear. The claim of the human mind to be able to do good and to do evil is a false one. Its so-called good is only a tempered form of evil. And this is what the writer of the Jehovistic document in Genesis meant by the verse, "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The only true thing that can be said about evil is that it is a lie; the only semblance of power evil can ever manifest is the illusion produced by being deceived by a lie.

The scientific fact is that there is no power but God, and if God is infinite, then good is infinite, for God is good. Evil is nothing but the negation of this, an illusion which the understanding of this destroys. And because this fact is a scientific fact, it can be demonstrated to-day as it was nineteen hundred years ago, in the destruction of sorrow, and sickness, and sin. In proportion as this scientific fact is grasped, and this demonstration made, the kingdom of God does come upon man, and with it "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding."

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