Editorial July 3, 1915 Issue

Compassion, Limited

John B. Willis

The old-fashioned teaching about everlasting punishment can no longer be said to be popular, even among dyed-in-the-wool theologians. Yet one often comes upon indisputable evidence of a disposition to honor this antique dogma by subjecting certain persons and acts to unending condemnation. Even earnest Christians have been known to illustrate the fact that the momentum of habit often expresses itself in practice a long time after one's theory respecting the truly Christian attitude toward a given fact or situation has been fully righted.

How often has the saying, "Once a jail-bird, always a jail-bird," been given crushing significanse for some unfortunate at the moment when a word of confidence and hearty good will would have given him the courage to struggle on until he had worked out his problem. How often, too, have sisters and daughters, who perchance have been sinned against far more than they have sinned, been made to feel that the hand of every man, and especially of every woman, is against them, and that their blight is thereby made unremovable. The heart of "the new penology," and the explanation of the interesting facts being chronicled at Sing Sing and elsewhere today, is found in the proof being given to convicts that belief in human redemption has been substituted for the longtime belief in everlasting punishment. Little can be done for wayward men or women so long as their would-be helpers are governed by the belief that their sins cannot be pardoned, much less forgotten, by "good society."

The teaching of Christian Science finds an end to punishment in the infinite and eternal reality of good alone. It declares that while "the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts," the "process of higher spiritual understanding improves mankind until error disappears, and nothing is left which deserves to perish or to be punished" (Science and Health, pp. 497, 251). The habit of looking askance at an individual, and of warning others that he is "in error" and cannot be safely trusted, supplies painful proof that the spirit of "everlasting punishment" is yet extant.

Enjoy 1 free Sentinel article or audio program each month, including content from 1898 to today.

Send a comment to the editors
NEXT IN THIS ISSUE
Editorial
True Iconoclasm
July 3, 1915
Contents

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit