Article October 16, 1909 Issue

Strange as are your correspondent's views on evidence,...

Frederick Dixon

Glasgow (Scot.) News

Strange as are your correspondent's views on evidence, they are perhaps not so strange as his theological views. "If nothing exists which God did not create, where," he demands, "did all this mortal error come from?" The writer of the book of Genesis declares distinctly that "God saw all that he had made, and, behold, it was very good;" the writer of the fourth Gospel declares that "without him was not any thing made that was made." It follows inevitably that if evil is real, it was not only made by God, but is good. Your correspondent seems to have realized this, for he writes that "it will be a sad day for you when your helpers and sympathizers realize that there is no such thing as sin, sickness, pain, or death." In plain English, he looks forward to an eternity of suffering with perfect equanimity. The Christian Scientist, on the other hand, regards it as sad that anybody should believe that God, who is infinite, should have created evil in the name of good. "God," says the apostle John, "is love."

"Evil," writes Mrs. Eddy on page 327 of Science and Health, "has in reality neither place nor power in the human or the divine economy." Orthodox theology quarrels with this statement, but when pressed it has not the courage of its convictions. Evil, it insists, is real, but God did not make it. He created man with the power of free will, and man fell away from grace, and did evil in His sight. Such teaching is centuries behind that of the pagan Epictetus, who wrote, "As a mark is not set up for the purpose of being missed, so the nature of evil has no existence in the universe."

Now, if evil is real, so real that it could appear to the first man in the form of a snake, it must have come from somewhere. If God did not create it, it created itself, and you have a world with more than one first cause, that is to say, without any first cause, which is frankly absurd. It follows, therefore, with inexorable logic, either that evil is unreal, or that God made it. In which last case, as He pronounced all that He made very good, evil must of necessity be very good, and you will have to fall back for an explanation on the Heraclitean theory of the identity of contraries.

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