Article November 30, 1912 Issue

In a late issue the writer of the column entitled "A Seasonable Chat"...

William J. Bonnin

Blackpool (Eng.) Gazette-News

In a late issue the writer of the column entitled "A Seasonable Chat" allowed himself to say that the whole truth about Christian Science lies in the fact that people believe just what they wish to believe. So far from being the whole truth about Christian Science, such a statement has no relation to Christian Science teaching or practise whatever. For Christian Science is the Science of truth, as declared and demonstrated by the Founder of Christianity. The knowledge of absolute truth and reality with which it enlightens the human consciousness incidentally brings it to pass, a kind of by-product as it were in this work of illumination, that beliefs hitherto masquerading as knowledge should, on exposure, reveal the characteristics of falsity and imposture; but to think that Christian Science concerns itself primarily with what "people believe" is about as correct as to imagine that an Atlantic liner crosses the ocean for the sake of the wake it leaves behind it.

The only true consciousness is the consciousness of truth. The consciousness that is aware only of a temporal and unreal presentation of things is a consciousness of falsity, a false consciousness. To it everything is material, and God, Spirit, is not admitted into His own universe. To it evil is just as real and just as powerful as good. It has even produced a pessimistic philosophy that has gone so far as to assert that evil is the real, and good but the absence of this real, a nonentity. But the consciousness of the positive nature of good, its unity and omnipresence, is a consciousness of absolute truth, a true consciousness. "I am God, and there is none else," "Do not I fill heaven and earth?" To know this reveals the unreal and counterfeit nature of the evil and discord that begins and ends in the false consciousness, and operates to destroy those material manifestations of evil which are raised up in the form of sin and misery and disease in antagonism to truth. These foes that harass life, the human sense of life that is, for there can be no foe to reach real life, disappear as the human or temporal sense of life gives place to the understanding of true life, which Jesus declared to be knowledge of God and of Christ. The impartation of this knowledge constitutes the life-bringing mission of Christian Science.

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In a late issue the writer of the column entitled "A Seasonable Chat"...

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