Article September 27, 1913 Issue

Sovereignty of Good

GEORGE H. MOORE

The teachings of Christian Science are establishing an entirely new concept of universal good. No one who knows of the new fields of thought and aciton into which this Science has introduced Christian practise, and of its ever-widening range of demonstration, can question this achievement. Its great significance appears in the fact that no religious teaching can be fundamentally true which is not absolutely universal in application. Universal truth alone is imperative, alone is final, for it alone is scientific. Divine Science knows no exceptions to the operation of its law. To conceive of truth as tentative, or of religion as mere reverence for truth, without participation in its practical workings, is to rob them of all semblance of divine authority.

The church, the sect, the religious theory of the past, each has vaunted with considerable freedom its claim to finality merely as a matter of dogmatic theory void of proof. Great religious organizations have been built up around some one minor phase of fundamental truth, as that divine Love is universal in the sense that it shall in some remote day be able to vindicate itself as embracing all humanity as well as to lift the race out of its rebellious plight, and so restore God's authority over His creation. Insistence on this conception of the universal may have done much to broaden religious thought and mitigate the influence of selective and exclusive creeds. The church has failed, however, to make even this teaching practical, because it has failed to see that divine Love embraces every instant of time and every detail of human need, as well as every item of creation; that Love knows neither check nor interference in its designs, and needs no vindication through human acceptance of its purposes.

Many earnest students in these churches have made the grave mistake of identifying religious study with antiquarian research, of looking to the roots of its tree of sacred theology for validation of their claims, rather than to the fruitage of its growing branches. Jesus said, "By their fruits ye shall know them." The hopes of humanity are not buried in the graves of our forefathers. Hope is alive to the hungry present and to the opening of a better future. The truth revealed to our fathers is our heritage only as it fruits in the present. An inactive, complacent present is but so much dead timber, a slur over the past as well as a blur over our glimpses of the future.

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