Editorial December 16, 1916 Issue

Overlooking Is Not Overcoming

William D. McCrackan

There is nothing in the teaching of Christian Science which could lead any one to suppose that evil is to be overcome by overlooking it. The Christianly scientific teaching in regard to the unreality of evil is explicit and should leave no loophole by which perversion or subversion can enter. The understanding of the absolute reality of God and His creation, the All-in-all, carries with it as a necessary corollary the unreality of a supposititious devil and all his works, but in relative human experience every statement of truth must be proved and every form of error uncovered in order to be definitely overcome.

Overlooking, ignoring, avoiding, suppressing, pretending, are all futile phases of the attempt to pervert and subvert the Science of Christianity and to render vain the labor of its discovery and founding. It may therefore be taken for granted that a condition of indolence, indifference, apathy, or neutrality toward the standard of good and evil, is a premonitory symptom of mental dry-rot or of trouble in the brewing. More often such a state of passive neutrality is the prelude to a tragedy on the stage of human happenings, wherein nations as well as individuals suddenly become involuntary and, for the time being, helpless actors.

The question then naturally presents itself what the method may be by which argumentative subtlety can hope to induce a well meaning Scientist to believe that overlooking evil can possibly result in overcoming it. May not the line of reasoning follow this course: Insinuation number one, "You say that evil is unreal; then why try to make it so?" The well meaning Scientist may be taken unawares and momentarily nonplused by this question, so that he may not bethink himself in time to reply, that in truth evil is unreal, but in mortality it seems to be truth itself, and so requires to be handled again and again in its different phases before its total unreality can appear.

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