Article July 11, 1908 Issue

Our critic is confusing the absolute with the relative, in...

Frederick Dixon

Lewisham (Eng.) Gazette

Our critic is confusing the absolute with the relative, in exactly the same way in which Pilate, according to one of the greatest scholars and theologians the Church of England has ever known, did in his ever repeated question, "What is truth?" The Greek text, Dr. Westcott insisted, distinguished clearly between "the truth" (the absolute Truth) of Jesus and the mere "truth" (the relative truth) of Pilate, but the distinction was lost in the translation. Now if goodness cannot be defiled, how is any one going to defile its gifts, which must necessarily be good also? You may abuse a mere relative sense of what constitutes goodness, you cannot abuse goodness which is absolute. Because a schoolboy says that two and two make five, you might as well maintain that he was outraging the basic rule of the multiplication table, when he is simply demonstrating his own ignorance of that rule. Our critic is walking into the open trap which Hume himself walked into in his effort to define a miracle, and which Huxley closed so remorselessly upon him.

There are no degrees of truth, there are degrees of departure from truth. Two and two equal four is absolute, but two and two equal five is a degree less untrue than two and two equal six. The admission that hypnotism can be used for evil is the admission it is not good, and that, as I previously said,—at another time and in another place,—any good it may seem to do is only a tempered form of evil, just as two and two equal five is tempered form of the error that two and two equal a million. One of the most atrocious fallacies ever imposed on the human consciousness is the suggestion that you can have too much of a good thing. You cannot have too much Truth, for God is Truth; or too much Love, for God is Love; you can have too much alcohol, though there are circumstances in which alcohol may relatively seem to do good, for the simple reason that alcohol is not a good thing....

Christ Jesus healed all manner of diseases, and healed them without physical aid or the aid of suggestion. He never made a diagnosis of symptoms; his therapeutics were moral, his physiology spiritual. If he healed all manner of diseases, and furthermore healed them instantaneously, his method must necessarily be at once the most efficacious and scientific. But the knowledge of that method is not to be by examination of disease in a hospital, but by an effort, which Paul describes as praying without ceasing, to "let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus."

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