Editorial January 30, 1915 Issue

"Whom Satan hath bound"

John B. Willis

Every question of correction or improvement is, or ought to be, a question of cause and effect. The effort to remove an ill condition without paying any attention to that which occasions it, is a manifest folly, in which it is hardly to be expected that intelligent people would be interested, since, as they know, superficial endeavor in any line cannot possibly yield valuable returns. How many failures of well-intentioned efforts in all the years find their full explanation in the fact that they have been devoted to the attempted remedying of effects, the amelioration of human ills, rather than to the removal of the cause of these ills! and it is this fact which gives such pertinence ot the emphasis laid by the Founder of Christian Science, in all her teaching, upon the subject of causation.

In the story narrated in the thirteenth chapter of Luke, Christ Jesus declared the woman's pitiful state to be the result of the activity of evil, Satan, whom upon another occasion he named "a liar, and the father of it." He thus affirmed that falsity was immediately responsible for this human ill, and no one can fail to see that this could have come about only through the deception of human sense, and that the false belief which thus empowers untruth, which gives it efficiency in this way, can be corrected only by that demonstration of truth which makes the retention of this belief no longer possible. This is illustrated a hundred times in every school room, every day. It is a matter of fact and of good common sense which nobody can question; and yet the teaching of Christian Science seems to have proved an offense to many Christian people because it insists upon the wisdom of being governed by this simple logic in our thought of the nature of sickness, and of the proper way to heal it.

It is not so difficult to explain how the thought of the early Christians was led astray regarding this matter, as it is to explain how intelligent Christians can fail to respond to the elemental sanity of the Christian Science point of view when the subject is brought to their attention today. Their attitude becomes the more surprising when it is remembered that the church has always declared sin to be the occasion of all disharmony, and accepted Jesus' statement that truth knowing is the gateway to freedom. The utter incongruity of this doubting-Thomas, self-contradictory state of mind is rapidly dawning upon general thought.

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