Editorial December 2, 1916 Issue

The Word Hypocrisy

William D. McCrackan

The advancing Christian Scientist may suffer temporarily from the self-accusation of hypocrisy unless the line of demarcation between the real and the unreal is kept sharply drawn. The apparent discrepancy between the absolute which dawns upon human apprehension and human life itself, between endeavor and fulfilment, may react upon the worker if the world's estimate of reality is once admitted.

Mortal mind attempts to maintain a double standard. It fosters a fictitious double-mindedness, and so incurs the reproof of James, who writes, "A double minded man is unstable in all his ways." It would declare that good and evil are both of divine origin, hence true and real. Metaphysically considered, therefore, hypocrisy is the belief in the reality of both Mind and matter, Spirit and the flesh, Soul and material sense, Principle and corporeality, Life and death, Truth and error, Love and hate or fear. Mrs. Eddy writes on page 360 of Science and Health: "Either Spirit or matter is your model. If you try to have two models, then you practically have none." Whoever is earnestly striving to demonstrate the unreality of evil through the spiritual understanding of the reality of God, good, need not barb the arrow of condemnation by accepting the accusation of hypocrisy.

The world has a yardstick of its own wherewith to measure its belief of hypocrisy, but Christian Science, elucidating the Scriptures, digs much deeper into human consciousness, and lays bare fundamental hypocrisy as a false belief about reality. In the gospel of Matthew we read that Jesus warned his disciples against "the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees." This leaven, we are told, the disciples understood to be the doctrine of these schools of thought, and in Luke's gospel Jesus further defined this leaven as "hypocrisy." The leaven or doctrine thus condemned, namely, the belief that good and evil are both true and real, was the one generally prevailing at that time, and is still prevailing today except in so far as it is being destroyed by Christian Science.

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