Article January 1, 1910 Issue

AN AGNOSTIC'S PROGRESS

MALCOLM BRUCE MILNE.

Beyond the immunity from physical disease which Christian Science confers, there is another aspect which raises it to a much higher point of importance in the benefits it brings to mankind, and that is in its unfolding to us the possibility, nay the duty, of being happy ourselves and of bringing happiness to others. In reading the works of even our greatest thinkers one cannot but be impressed with the note of sadness which runs through their helpless, hopeless strivings to solve "the riddle of life" and to fit a key which will unlock the gates of that heaven which every one of them in his heart feels sure must somewhere exist. Taking the case, say, of the men who followed Darwin and helped to work out his theory, one is forced into acquiescence with their conclusions by the quiet, unanswerable logic of their thought, although everything that is best in human nature is rebelling against the sentence which these conclusions pronounce.

Starting with Darwin's premises, it is impossible to arrive, honestly, at any other conclusions, and the horror of the logical consequence of doctrines such as "the survival of the fittest," drives one deeper and deeper into the despair of impotence against so irresistible and implacable a doom. Happily for us, we know now that there is an error in his premises, and that an error in the premise inevitably carries an error into the conclusion. This error Mrs. Eddy has exposed in her statement of Christian Science in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," where she enunciates a hypothesis which at once satisfies the reason and reconciles our ideas of justice with the code of ethics taught by Jesus of Nazareth nineteen hundred years ago.

In the old thought, if one thinks at all and is not satisfied to accept things on the authority of some one else, one is inevitably and inexorably forced into a dilemma from which there is no possible hope of escape. Stated baldly the situation is this: If God is good, He cannot be omnipotent; and if omnipotent, He cannot be wholly good, for He appears to permit evil. The numerous explanations which have been offered to us, with a view of reconciling God's goodness with the existence and reality of evil, will none of them bear analysis from the standpoint of reason or justice. To say that God afflicts us in His inscrutable wisdom, simply begs the question, so far as we are concerned, for how can we hope to understand anything which depends for its sanction upon something which is inscrutable? To say that God sends evil to chasten us is unjust, since the reason for the chastening is not made known to us, and how can we hope to be better in the future when we are left in ignorance of the crime for which we are being chastened?

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