Article December 19, 1914 Issue

The feature of your paper entitled "Truth's Saturday Sermon,"...

Judge Clifford P. Smith

Elkhart (Ind.) Truth

The feature of your paper entitled "Truth's Saturday Sermon," with its opportunity for presenting the various views of religious truth, seems to be a pulpit from which each speaker may preach the gospel in which he believes. If so, the mere gibe at Christian Science or sneer at Christian Scientists, inserted in a recent "Saturday Sermon," was ill suited to its surroundings. May not a Christian Scientist have the space for one day in which to speak affirmatively upon the same subject?

Every man, whether he looks for evolution or for salvation, expects to live on a higher plane of existence than is visible to the physical senses. We have no reason to be satisfied with the life that appears to begin from mortal birth, which seems to be subject to all evil, fear, failure, sin, suffering, disease, disability, and to end in death. Eternal and abundant life is the prayer of humanity; it is the goal of righteous effort. In this situation the assurance of "things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," tells us of an existence for man that far transcends the so-called life of mortals. Think the thing through, and it will become unthinkable that man should really be what he seems,—a bundle of contradictions, a mingling of opposite qualities, a meeting of conflicting forces. He must have a more consistent being than this.

For ages without number, humanity has accepted evil as an actual power and a fearful reality. Intelligent truth-seekers have sometimes perceived more or less clearly that the government of the universe could not possibly be divided between two antagonistic powers; and sometimes they have inquired how evil can exist in spite of divine and infinite Love; but no explanation consistent with the omnipotence and goodness of Deity has ever been furnished by scholastic theology. So Christendom has taken its choice between evil as an independent power and a concept of God as including evil. In either view, the resistance to the adversary has been largely vitiated by the admission of its reality; for no effort which concedes the truth or verity of error can ever overcome it. Evil can be abolished only with the spiritual understanding which dispels it as illusion. The tenable and provable position is that the divine Mind includes the whole of reality; that evil is a lie, and the father of itself.

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