Editorial July 30, 1910 Issue

"NOT ACCORDING TO THE APPEARANCE."

John B. Willis

No one can meditate upon human disposition and history, even for a brief time, without realizing how all-inclusive is and ever has been the habit of hasty and erroneous criticism, and no one can ever measure or define the enormity of the injustice which has resulted therefrom, the wrongs that have been inflicted, and the consequent handicap which has been placed upon individual and racial advance. Most of us have been made familiar in our own experience with the unrighteousness and unfairness of the world's judgment as a whole. We all know, too, how ignoble and unchristian is this human impulse, and that Christ Jesus was but voicing a universal law when he counseled his disciples that they "judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment."

The significance of Christian Science to the success of our effort to conform to this divine requirement is seen the moment one comes to understand its teaching respecting the dispositions and tendencies that lead us into this sin. Among these mental laziness takes prominence. Men are wont, when a statement is heard respecting a given person or thing, to jump to a conclusion which is wholly unwarranted and the fallacy of which would be recognized were but a moment's careful thought given to the subject, or just a little effort made to know all the facts. We have also found, in our experience, that misjudgments are sure to attend anger; that they characterize the conclusions of those who are prejudiced or unduly self-assured, of those who are dominated by educational bias, and especially of those who maintain the better-than-thou attitude of self-righteousness. When, moreover, we remember that erroneous conclusions are the inevitable outcome of reliance upon the testimony of material sense, we begin to have some idea of the universality of this offense.

From all this mental superficiality and mesmeric stupor God calls men to awake, and the redemptive relation of Christian Science teaching to these unchristian states and conditions of thought is revealed in the fact that it addresses itself to the fundamental need of a quickening, vitalizing sense of and love for eternal Truth. No genuine Truth-lover can be content with anything less than the truth, and it is this that gives him poise in the presence of all seemings. He now begins to recognize the mandatory as well as the prophetic meaning of the Master's words, "Ye shall know the truth," and he makes judgment wait on verification. Furthermore, the Truth-lover is always a lover of men, and when the thought of man is separated in Christian Science from the thought of mortal weaknesses, the pitiableness of the human plight immediately appears, and that throb of brotherliness is felt which, while condemning the sin, would willingly suffer for the sinner.

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