Editorial September 14, 1912 Issue

SEEKING FOR ORIGIN

John B. Willis

Every-day experience has to do in large part with things as human sense finds them, and the great majority even of professed Christians accept the so-called common-sense, materialistic view of substance, and contentedly trudge along in this "broad" mortal way. In so far, however, as thought is awakened through spiritual quickening, a spirit of inquiry invariably asserts itself. Men insist upon going behind the scenes, upon asking for explanation, for cause and origin, and though these initial doubtings have always been looked upon by many as the signs of heresy and religious decay, they have in fact witnessed to progress. The questioner may be pronounced skeptical, but he has certainly begun to grow.

Having thus been committed to the effort to think things out for himself, one ere long perceives that to some so-called things he cannot assign origin, since in the nature of the case this can be considered only with respect to that which is substantial. He sees that darkness is not a thing, but simply a sense of the absence of something, namely, light; that, in fact, darkness is but a mark of our present inability to discern the reality of being, the manifestations of Truth. What was once thought of as objective actuality, is now recognized as a subjective incapacity, ignorance, and since nothing cannot become something to intelligence, he understands that to divine Mind there can be no darkness at all. Reasoning in the same way, Mrs. Eddy reached the same irresistible conclusion respecting sin. She says, "When we put off the false sense for the true, and see that sin and mortality have neither Principle nor permanency, we shall learn that sin and mortality are without actual origin or rightful existence" (Science and Health, p. 281).

This brings us at once to the healing philosophy of Christian Science, its declaration that evil, all error, may be shorn of power and reduced to nothingness by our awakening to the truth of being, the divine point of view in which falsity cannot even appear. The simplicity, naturalness, and reliability of this philosophy of spiritual healing, can but appeal to all who remember the ease and completeness with which a newly apprehended truth dispels the error which had formerly governed thought. The theological insistence that evil is real, legitimately precipitates the question of its origin, and that to the utter confusion of those who concede evil's reality and yet maintain that God is the only cause, since it is the inescapable conclusion to which the logical are led, that if evil is real, good has produced and must be responsible for its opposite; that light has begotten darkness! Every effort to explain evil as a reality ends in this colossal contradiction, this utterly discouraging dethronement of Deity.

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