AN AGNOSTIC'S PROGRESS
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?
The contention that our afflictions are for our good should necessarily carry with it an injunction against our trying to overcome evil. If evil is for our good, the more we have of it the better. But who among all those who stand for this doctrine would hesitate for an instant to get rid of the evil as quickly as possible? The doctrine that evil is good in solution is nothing more than a piece of sophistry, for if evil is good in solution then it is not evil at all, but good; a mere juggling with terms and a proposition which successfully robs us of every means of distinguishing good from evil.
Now Christian Science starts with the postulate that God is not only good but also omnipotent, and with this as a working hypothesis it deduces the fact that evil is no part of God's creation; hence it cannot affect man injuriously, since from God alone we derive all life and being. Here we are at once confronted with a crux round which more controversy and misunderstanding has centered than round any other—the unreality of evil. The testimony of the physical senses, in which for generations we have trusted and believed, must be thrown over as untrustworthy if God is to be maintained as good and omnipotent.
The proposition at first sounds absurdly wild and almost too foolish to command a moment's thought, but it is deduced by exactly the same process of reasoning as the conclusions which impaled us on the horns of the dilemma mentioned above. But because a thing is outside the range of our previous experience, are we to condemn it as impossible? What does it mean if we do? In the first place it means that we are condemning and hampering all progress, and in the second that we are behaving in the way in which the opponents of every important discovery which has ever been made throughout the whole course of the world's history have behaved. Copernicus, Galileo, Robert Boyle, Columbus, Sir Isaac Newton, Stephenson, Lesseps, Brunel; Volta, Morse, Edison, Marconi,—every one of these enunciated propositions which partially or wholly set at naught the accepted testimony of the physical senses, and every one of them met with the same violent opposition and derision from those who had not risen to the same height of thought. But which of them was right? Did the ignorance of the many affect the truth of the discoveries of the few? Did the ignorance of the many make untrue the truths which these men enunciated? And so the question we have to ask ourselves is not, Does this proposition compel us to deny the testimony of the physical senses? but rather, Can any evidence be adduced to justify such a departure from our accepted beliefs?
It is here that we must depart from the realm of speculative theory and continue the argument by means of actual ascertained facts. What those facts are may be learned from the testimonies of healing in Christian Science which are now being given throughout the civilized world. Every month some are published in The Christian Science Journal, and every week others appear in the Christian Science Sentinel, while a still greater number are being voiced every Wednesday evening in some hundreds of churches throughout the five continents. The weight of evidence thus accumulated and accumulating removes from the thinking of any fair-minded person every doubt as to the ability of Christian Science to do what it claims to do, and thus raises the working hypothesis with which it started to the solid position of an eminently practical demonstrable science. By science I mean what is meant by the dictionary definition, viz., "Knowledge systematized, truth ascertained."
Now Christian Science differs essentially from every other code of ethics in this respect, that it must be imported into every action of every-day life and lived. It cannot be kept locked away in the inner recesses of our mind, a beautiful theory of high ideals, so high in fact as to be entirely beyond any hope of realization and so impracticable that it can only be used as a subject for academic discussion. Mere intellectual assent to its truth is of no value; it must be lived and used and understood. And we find that in proportion as it is used and demonstrated, so our understanding of it grows. In proportion as we cling to the idea of God as good and as having no knowledge of evil nor of permitting it for any purpose whatsoever, in this proportion evil loses its power to dominate and hurt us.
As we begin to see that our mortal ideas of sin, disease, disaster, hate, malice, and revenge have no sanction in this divine Mind, and as we allow our thought to be filled with nothing but thoughts of good, of charity, of loving-kindness, of honesty, of rightness, so we begin to manifest the products of these thoughts in the place of the inharmonious products of our former mode of thinking. To have discovered that we are not the creatures of inevitable circumstance, that we are not dominated by our environment, that right can and does outweigh wrong, that evil has no more power to hurt us than we give it in our own consciousness, brings a peace of mind, a happiness, and a sense of freedom which it is impossible to exaggerate.
