Article August 1, 1914 Issue

It is not very reasonable from any standpoint to suppose...

W. C. Williams—in <i>Baltimore</i> (Md.) <i>American</i>

It is not very reasonable from any standpoint to suppose that Jesus would take away suffering if it was God's law that humanity should suffer for the purposes of salvation. On the contrary, Jesus demonstrated beyond dispute that pain was one of the things from which even mortals were to be saved. It can be readily understood why those who follow Jesus' command to heal the sick are considered outside the pale of Christianity by those who do not obey this command, or by those who maintain that their idea of Christian teaching must be the correct one, since it is orthodox. Perhaps the best answer to this is, that in the time of Jesus there was not an ecclesiastic or a religious body that regarded him as orthodox, yet that did not prove his teaching to be erroneous. I do not believe that even all so-called orthodox ministers will agree that it is "a firmly established doctrine of both the Scripture and the fathers, that pain and even sin, by the grace of God, lead to a happier end than if not occurrent."

Pain, when the result of sin, has doubtless caused many to abandon sin; but this cannot well be interpreted to mean that a loving Father, whose eyes are too pure to behold evil, would intentionally (if this word is considered to have a different meaning from wilfully) create either. What would be the worldly judgment of a man who gave his child a disease so that when cured the child would better appreciate health? Would the father be loved more for so doing? If we aspired more to the Mind "which was also in Christ Jesus," we should learn that he suffered only to show how, by knowing the truth, all could overcome suffering as he overcame it. If it was God's law that we should suffer pain, we would be attempting to break that law every time we tried to relieve our suffering, whereas Jesus showed the multitudes that it was the fulfilment of the law of God to overcome suffering.

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