Article August 29, 1908 Issue

Sin, from the standpoint of Christian Science, may be...

Frederick Dixon—London, Eng.

The Church Times

Sin, from the standpoint of Christian Science, may be defined as the expression of all that is unlike God. This is casting the net much wider than is ordinarily the custom. It includes sins of omission as well as sins of commission, the things which have been mistakenly left undone no less than the things which obviously ought not to have been done. The man, for instance, who has been overtaken by disease as the result of flagrant sin is branded by the whole world as a sinner; but the man who is ill at all would never have been ill if he had fully understood the power of that Mind "which was also in Christ Jesus." The Christian Scientist is the last person in the world to ignore or to excuse sin; he knows perfectly well that no human being is absolutely without it, and that "if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves;" but he does not conceive that it is any part of his duty, in his struggle with it, to endow it with power, and by describing it as real, to proclaim its indestructibility. To the Christian Scientist that only is real which is of God, all else is a temporary belief in some unreality. When he says that man is without sin, he alludes to the spiritual man made by God, who is Spirit, perfect, in His own image and likeness, and not to the material counterfeit of that man, subject to all the supposed laws of the flesh, to sin, disease, and death.

Such a theory of sin no more destroys the necessity for the atonement than the views of the advanced philosophic idealists of to-day, with respect to the unreality of matter, do away, for them, with a necessity for doctors. At the same time, without any desire at all to indulge in cheap criticism, it is difficult to define what the orthodox view of the atonement really is. Only quite recently the vice-principal of the Theological College at Lichfield contributed a paper to one of your contemporaries, in which, after declaring that the Miltonic view of the atonement outraged man's moral sense, he proceeded to investigate what he termed "four typical modern theories" as a prelude to unfolding a fifth one of his own. The word "atonement" is itself only a development of the noun onement, formed from the now archaic verb, to one. Wyclif uses the word onement, which early in the sixteenth century began to be written at-onement, though still retaining the simple sense of unity, as may be seen from a single quotation from Shakespeare's "Richard II.":—

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