Article January 25, 1913 Issue

In the Telegraph's report of the Sheffield church revival,...

W. E. Fell

Sheffield (Eng.) Daily Telegraph

In the Telegraph's report of the Sheffield church revival, Archdeacon Madden quotes Sir Oliver Lodge, with marked disapproval, as saying that sin was a thing not to be worried about, and that this was the attitude of the higher man today. Also that Christian Scientists regarded sin as a matter of the imagination. To leave the latter statement as it stands would be to convey a wrong impression of the teaching of Christian Science on this important topic. Christian Science awakens the sinner, and taches him that he is forgiven only as sin is forsaken and destroyed. To the carnal mind, that mind which St. Paul declared to be "enmity against God," sin is by no means a phenomenon of the imagination; it is only too real. The apostle, however, explains in the eighth chapter of the epistle to the Romans, that the false mentality or carnal mind is no real part of the spiritual man in God's image and likeness,—"is not subject to the law of God."

Jesus said to Nicodemus, much to his astonishment, that he, the carnal-minded, must be born again, of water, purity, and Spirit, or he could not see the kingdom of God. People are every whit as much astonished today, when Christian Science reiterates this demand of the Master, as was Nicodemus two thousand years ago. Jesus declared that sin, or the devil, "abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him;" and that he is "a liar, and the father of it." Positively, that which has no truth in it cannot be described as real. Evil is a negation, a belief in the absence of good, but good is omnipresent, for God is good, and there can be no other presence than the all-presence.

Just so long as we believe in the reality of evil, and therefore fear it, we are under its suppositional dominion. Evil has no more power, presence, or knowledge than we permit it in our own consciousness. God, good, is all the power there is, all the presence there is, and all the knowledge or science there is, else His attributes are meaningless jargon. If evil is real or part of His universe, God created it, for the Bible tells us that "all things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made." Either God made evil, or evil has no existence in the realm of the real. If God made evil, man's case is hopeless, for the nearer he approaches to God the nearer must he approach to evil and its baneful train,—sin, disease, and death. The Scriptures inform us, however, that God is of too pure eyes to behold evil, and cannot look on iniquity. We can here and now prove the unreality of evil by ceasing to sin.

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