Article March 17, 1917 Issue

Truth Absolute

REUBEN POGSON

It was the transitory nature of all things material which was dawning upon a child's consciousness when she asked, "Does everything break?" Her mother fertilized the opportunity by presenting the contrast between the eternality of Spirit and the flittings of materiality. For many years mortals pursue material prizes, only to find that they all break. Each pursuer sees the unsatisfactory nature of the prizes which he himself does not strive for, but fails to discern that his own unattained prize rests on the same feet of clay. It is all written in Ecclesiastes, but in high disdain we pay the expensive fees and enter the school of hard experience to learn under the rod of affliction.

There can be nothing of absolute actuality in a transitory world. Such a world exists only to mortal sense. "Up" exists only so long as there is a "down;" "here" depends upon a "there;" obliterate a transitory "now," and we should have no "then" of any kind. If we were to apply to material things such absolute terms as infinite, eternal, good, we would either be using them in hyperbole or would have reduced them to a mortal sense. It is one of the easiest things in the world to take excerpts from a book containing absolute and relative terms and make the author appear to be inconsistent. The Bible and the Christian Science text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mrs. Eddy, contain absolute and relative terms, and the world contains critics.

To reply in terms of absolute truth to a question put from the standpoint of material sense might seem like perjury, which in a court of law would receive a penal sentence. Christian Scientists must distinguish between the spiritual facts which they are taught in Science and Health to declare to themselves, and what they have to admit to those who are questioning them from a material standpoint. When the husband of the Shunammite woman questioned her respecting the necessity of her journey to see Elisha, she replied, "It shall be well;" but when she answered Elisha's query, "Is it well with the child?" she said, "It is well," although to mortal belief the child was dead. The difference in her replies seems to have been the result of her recognition of the diverse standpoints of the questioners. Jesus exposed the inability of the material or human sense to perceive truth when he said, "Having eyes, see ye not?"

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