Article October 25, 1913 Issue

Will you permit me to try to clear up a not very easy...

Frederick Dixon—London, England

Popular Science Siftings

Will you permit me to try to clear up a not very easy question in a short letter? I refer to G. W. Leach's criticism of the Christian Science teaching with respect to sin (see No. 1133, "P. S. S."). The Christian Scientist, observes this critic, says that sin is unreal, therefore as it exists, God must have created something unreal. Unfortunately for his argument, he arrives at his deduction in this way, "According to our Scriptures, evil is implied and permitted by the creator as part and portion of His own creation." Now, the Bible distinctly says that God created every thing that was made and created it good. If, then, God created evil, He made evil and made it good. There is no escape whatever from that quandary. It is not a discovery of Christian Science, it was indeed one of the arguments which led to the Gnostic controversy.

It is impossible to go very deeply into the matter in a short space, but what Christian Science teaches is this: God created everything that was made and created it good, therefore God did not create evil. Neither can He be said to permit evil, for if He created all that was made, He must have created evil before He permitted it. The alternative is that there are two creators, which would mean that after all, God did not create everything that was made. Christian Science, therefore, maintains that evil is nothing but a human sense of the absence of good; in other words, that it seems desperately real to the human mind until the gradual realization of absolute Truth exposes it in its original nothingness.

A famous scholar of the Church of England, Dr. Westcott, one of the bishops of Durham, has pointed out that in the fourth gospel, the gospel which declares that God made all that was made, a distinction is drawn, in the Greek text, between "the Truth," meaning the absolute spiritual Truth, and "truth," as a relative sense of truth. What Christian Science says is that sin is no part of absolute Truth, though, relatively speaking, it exists to the human consciousness; consequently, that, in the words of Jesus, when a man knows Truth, absolute Truth, he is freed from the relative ignorance of truth which presents evil to him as a reality.

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