Article November 16, 1912 Issue

BELIEF IN SIN

ADA JANE MILLER.

In Science and Health we read: "The belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts" (p. 497). These words from the tenets of our church have an added meaning as we take them fully into consciousness. Not only must the one who sins suffer, since this is divine law, but also he who believes that some one has sinned,—that sin exists as a reality, a subject for discussion.

Jesus gave the one rule for us to follow when some one has been deceived by a subtle argument that there is any good apart from God, infinite good. "What is that to thee?" Jesus said, "follow thou me." If we dwell upon the thought that some one has sinned, we experience the discord which results from belief in sin, and we regain our peace, our harmony of thought, only as we see the claim of sin for what it is,—a belief in a power apart from God,—whether the argument is presented to our own consciousness or whether it finds lodgment in our neighbor's thought, and we accept the argument in regard to him.

The words of Christ Jesus respecting Lazarus, "Loose him, and let him go," may mean to us: Loose him from the bondage of false belief; loose him by doing to him as you would have him do to you; loose him by denying the seeming, no matter what its guise, and affirming the truth of man's being. Only in this way, whether the belief of sin is in our own consciousness or in our thought of another, is there freedom, because belief in sin is inevitably followed by that punishment which is the keenest of all—a sense of separation from God. We maintain, consciously, our at-one-ment with the Father in proportion as thought is filled with that love which Paul defines as without dissimulation; the love that vaunteth not itself; the love that thinketh no evil, and recognizes as real only that which is an emanation from God.

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