Editorial October 23, 1909 Issue

EVIL'S INCONGRUITY

John B. Willis

Every truly noble nature has met with unnumbered experiances which have excited outspoken revolt against the untoward companionship in human life and thought of good and evil, truth and error. How few are the hours that do not bring us some exhibition of that continuous tragedy which is incident to the belief in the association of these opposites in nature and in experience. Delighted with a rose, so exquisitely modeled as to suggest the divine, we pluckit only to find a repulsive worm feeding upon its heart. The little bird whose cute ways and seraph song have made it a household treasure is left unguarded for a moment, and we are recalled by its despairing cry as it is snatched from its perch by a cruel claw. Thus in the home, the garden, the street, everywhere, the beautiful and the bestial, the inspiring and the iniquitous, are often found in that incongruous contact which begets in sensitive souls well-nigh continuous pain and protest.

The offense is yet more intimate — in the make-up of our friends, the members of our family, yes, in our own consciousness, we often come upon utter contradictions of nature and of impulse. How often have we found ourselves harboring a prejudice or a resentment that is wholly foreign to our aspiration and general attitude of thought !

Despite the multiplicity of such experiences, however, there remains the ineradicable sense that these things are unnatural, and unauthorized by any legitimate law or government, and we are sure that the innateness and persistence of the protest of higher sense is a prophecy of better things, a promise that the harmony and peace which should be, will he. Christian Science has tremendously intensified this conviction by its disclosure that in truth the good is never touched by evil, although the immediate effect of its study and acceptance sometimes seems to be an increase of the show and intensity of evil. Phases of ignoble and unchristian temperament that were latent are apparently made active, so that, in his becoming, the Christian Scientist has sometimes been a surprise to himself and his friends! This stir speaks, however, both for the uncovering of error and for the vitality and significance of the truth which is thus turning the fallow ground of mortal selfhood, and in the ever-increasing light more wholesome conditions presently appear.

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