Article June 17, 1911 Issue

Extraordinary as it is, it is nevertheless a matter of experience...

William J. Bonnin

Birkenhead and Cheshire (Eng.) Adverliser

Extraordinary as it is, it is nevertheless a matter of experience that the attempt to persuade the race to shake off the self-imposed shackles of evil invariably meets with suspicion and some degree of resentment. And so it is not surprising that human belief should rise in opposition to the declaration of absolute truth which Christian Science makes when it affirms that the one well-nigh universal superstition or false belief is that evil is some real entity or actual power. And it is quite in accord with precedent that the argument for the reality and power of evil should proceed along the exact lines that your correspondent adopted in his letter in your columns. For his letter amounts to nothing more than a defense of evil for that God has ordained it. "Both God the Father and the Son," says this critic, "have declared the existence of evil."

Now the truth is that neither ever did so. Of course one has to come to some understanding of the meaning of "existence" before this can be seen. No one dreams of denying that as a matter of human experience evil seems to exist, that according to material sense sin, disease, and death are stern realities. But, as one becomes able to differentiate between absolute truth and the mere human concept of truth, the claim to set up human experience or the human senses as an adequate standard, test, or criterion of reality or true existence, is seen to be nothing but mortal fatuity and presumption. So far from declaring that evil had any truth in it, Jesus said that the devil (i.e., evil) was a liar, and that there was no truth in him. Now, a liar is one who pretends that something is or exists which in fact does not exist, and so in that statement Jesus relegated evil to the realm of false belief and declared its existence to depend, like that of a lie, on the measure of belief accorded to it.

This may all appear a mere drawing of philosophical distinctions and abstractions. And the charge would hold if Christian Science stopped there. But it by no means does so. It declares that, just as darkness vanishes and is seen to be nothing before the light, the understanding of absolute truth, of the omnipresence and omnipotence of good, causes the evil of human experience to vanish and its nothingness to be exposed. It announces that when Jesus promised that the knowledge of the truth should set men free, he meant it. And if we but consider the point, there is only one thing for the knowledge of truth to set one free from. It could only set one free from the false, the lie, and as a lie cannot be known but only believed, it is from the bondage of our own false beliefs that we are to be saved. And this is now the experience of thousands who have given up the unprofitable practice of continually giving glory to the devil, or, in other words, of continually declaring the power and presence of evil, and have turned in Christian Science to obey the Bible injunction to give all power and glory to God, good, for these are finding that the false beliefs of sin and sickness are fading out of their experience, and that after all Christian salvation is salvation here and now from the woes that oppress mankind, and not a mere vague and conjectured salvation that one has first of all to die to attain to.

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Extraordinary as it is, it is nevertheless a matter of experience...

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