Editorial September 19, 1908 Issue

SEPARATE FROM SIN

John B. Willis

There are few mature people of thoughtful temperament and refined moral nature who have not suffered a sense of unspeakable revolt as they recalled the occasions of the past when they said and did ignoble things, when they clung to brooding thoughts which were an offense to their present ideals. Indeed human experience supplies no better sample of the tortures of hell than the feeling of shame and humiliation experienced by sensitive souls as they have stood face to face with a bit of their own history, burned into the very bone of memory, from which their better self turned away with a shudder of disgust. To know that one could have been so selfish, so mean, so vulgar, is to experience a sense of self-condemnation which well-nigh begets despair.

This remembrance of an unworthy past has amounted to such a tyranny in the case of some, that they have sought escape from it in the desert of asceticism or in the hoped for forgetfulness of death. To a far greater number, however, of less tragic but more heroic souls, it has brought those frequently recurring periods of depression and discouragement which have marred the peace and satisfaction of otherwise normal lives. They are standing for the ideal, and they are overcoming, but ever and anon they are beaten by the past "with many stripes," as the result of a baneful habit of mentally entertaining the unideal; a habit which is persisted in by many who could acknowledge at once that nothing could be more profitless and unchristian than this hanging-on-to-the-hateful, this pressing of the asp to one's bosom, upon every occasion of retrospect, until its poison is surging through every vein.

When evil has grown repulsive to men it is surely time for them to turn their backs upon it, and one of the great things about Christian Science is this, that it brings escape from memories which one can but despite. It does this by defining the true selfhood; by making it possible for men to separate between the condemned culprit of past sense and the inspiring consciousness of the Christ-idea. To cling to an unworthy past after the recoil of one's nobler selfhood is realized and registered before God, after the contrasting ideal is embraced and one is honestly and loyally pledged to it,—this is the very acme of unwisdom, and yet this is precisely what one may have done a thousand times. "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath be removed our transgressions from us:" so sings the psalmist rejoicingly, but how can this be so long as men persistently cling to and identify self with the unideal? Right living is a constant and persistent turning away in thought, in desire, and in declaration from all evil, and especially from all self-identification therewith.

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