Article January 30, 1909 Issue

The material senses of the people amongst whom Jesus...

Frederick Dixon

Christian Commonwealth

The material senses of the people amongst whom Jesus moved rarely rose to a clear perception of his words; and so, telling them that if they could not believe for the word's sake they must found their belief upon the works, he healed the sick and raised the dead and walked upon the waters, breaking every physical law in demonstration of the fact that those laws were not God's laws, and that a knowledge of God's law—that is, the spiritual law—would give man the dominion which the Bible declared God had given to him.

What, then, is the origin of the material law, the law by which sin entered the world, and through sin death, and everything that is unlike God? The question is simply a new demand for an explanation of the origin of evil; and the origin of evil never has been explained, and never will be, because a negation never had an origin. There is exactly one way to grasp the nothingness of evil, and that is by understanding the allness of God, just as until a boy grasps the fact that two and two make four he will never understand why two and two are not and never were five. The only occasion for the misconception that two and two are five is that they are four. Spiritual things, writes Paul, are spiritually discerned, and only in the persistent struggle to blot out from their consciousness all that is unlike God, in the effort to attain the Mind that was in Christ Jesus, can men hope to begin to gain the spiritual and scientific knowledge of God—that is, of Truth—and so discern evil as "a liar, and the father of it."

The Christian Science church is perfectly well aware that in a world in which the manifestation of evil is so prevalent, the unreality of evil will remain a pious theory unless the truth of it can be demonstrated practically. Jesus did demonstrated it practically, and the religion he preached was essentially a practical religion. He never suggested that he was gifted with a supernatural power denied to other men. On the contrary, he insisted in the most unequivocal terms that those who believed on him, understood his teaching, would be able to do his works, that is, reduce their knowledge to demonstration. Mrs. Eddy has shown the Christian Science church that it was the Mind of Christ which destroyed the appearance of evil in the first century, and which will to-day prove the unreality of it by its destruction, exactly in proportion as men let that Mind be in them which was in Christ Jesus; and so she has taught her followers that, like the early Christians, they also must prove their faith by their works.

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