Article August 26, 1916 Issue

Christian Casuistry

JOHN B. WILLIS

SPIRITUAL progress is realized only as one meets with and masters the unnumbered issues of individual experience. It calls for the recognition of the Christ-ideal as the standard of excellence, and for unfailing loyalty thereto, however large or small the question or event. When spiritual sense presides at this court of casuistry, those moral determinations are reached which honor divine Principle, and which are considerate for logical consistency, for conscience, one's highest concept of duty, and for every requirement of good. However seductive the pleas of mortal belief and selfish desire, those judgments are maintained which are in keeping with the beneficent exactions of Truth and Love. When, however, material sense is permitted to preside at this court, those tragedies inevitably result which constitute so large a part of human history, and which find such graphic portrayal in the case reported by Mrs. Eddy on pages 430 to 442 of Science and Health.

Here one's cultivated tastes and pet weaknesses, his educated bias and unconscious prejudices, are sure to put in an appearance, and the way in which they make their pleas sometimes ensnares the very elect. Here sophistry becomes serpentine. With clever insidiousness it always appeals as it did to Eve, in the name of good, and to an unwary ear it at once becomes daringly assertive in its efforts to shape decision. Here the spiritual welfare of many is imperiled, and here we have all compromised character in greater or less degree, and lost our footing perchance a thousand times.

Prevailing custom, the fact that "everybody does it," is an effective pleader in many a case. So too is the suggestion that the satisfaction of selfish or sensual desire is in keeping with our nature,—that we have been made as we are, and it must therefore be legitimate to consent to natural impulse, instead of maintaining a wearisome and apparently useless fight against it. This is a well-nigh ubiquitous situation, and even the casually observing will have no difficulty in nothing the ever-shifting aspects of the struggle in the lives of others if not in their own.

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