Article November 9, 1918 Issue

Ever since men have been known to think at all they...

The Christian Science Monitor

Ever since men have been known to think at all they have been puzzling themselves over matter. And the very fact that they have been doing this proves that they have had their doubts, though they were too tongue-tied and too mentally chaotic to be able to put these into words. Now the reason for this is very simple. It is that the only true thing about a lie is that it is a lie about some truth. You cannot lie about nothing, you must lie about something, and that something must be true. It is also equally certain that however deceptive the lie, the actual truth remains, in a realm of thought, to act as an unconscious but perpetual spur to human mental unrest. Human intelligence has various names for it, in its various phases. It calls it conscience, mental unrest, spirituality. It is that which smote the heart of David when he had numbered the people; that which caused the dwellers in the tombs to protest against being troubled before their time; and that which inspired the writer of the ninety-first psalm. It is the indestructible spiritual fact which alone makes possible the supposititious existence of the lie: that which made it possible for the author of the book of Job to write, "Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?" It is the truth which, precisely because it is the truth, cannot be hidden even from the lie; which caused the demoniac to cry aloud, "What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God most high?" It is, in short, that spiritual perception which, in the very necessity of things, must eventually destroy the lie, in the day of which Christ Jesus spoke, when he said, "If ye continue in my word ... ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." What can a knowledge of the truth free a man from, except the deception of a lie?

To the primitive man, who built his cities along the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, by the windings of the Nile, and in the Jordan valley, the man whose history is recorded for us in the Old Testament, all this was as yet a mystery. He saw the great rivers and the desert; the hills of limestone and the cedars of Lebanon; the solitudes where the lion roamed, and the oases where the shepherd made his flocks lie down in green pastures; and as he looked upon them he became more and more conscious that this could not be all. So he took the stocks and the stones, and made out of them idols, not as constituting Spirit itself, but as typifying those "invisible things" of which Paul was one day to write, to the church in Rome, as being "understood by the things that are made." Thus these idols became to the men of western Asia precisely what Isiah calls them, their "strong reasons" for a faith in something behind the evidence of their senses, in some god of nature who had "laid the foundations of the earth," and "made the cloud the garment thereof." It was this same instinct that made Doctor Johnson insist, centuries and centuries later, on the reality of the stones at Harwich. And was there so very broad and deep a mental gulf between the old nature worshiper, under the stars, upon the banks of the river Euphrates, and the learned lexicographer insisting, from his seat in the gallery of St. Clement Danes, in the era of Voltaire, that God, Spirit, made the material heavens and the material earth, and all the matter that therein is?

Unfortunately for the nature worshiper he did not permit his undefined premonitions of the truth about matter to stop here in the erection of stocks and stones. He allowed his rude sense of æsthetics, at all times only a subtle phase of sensuality, as anyone acquainted with the history of art, say in church building, must be aware, to get the better of him. The stocks and stones, bad enough in themselves, were gradually shapen into golden calves and men with the heads of birds, and finally into demons and representations of the foulest lusts of the flesh. And this, for the very simple reason that the human mind, which natural science was one day to proclaim the parent of the human body, gradually began to insist on its prerogative over its own phenomenon, and volubly to explain that it, with all its passions, was more worthy of respect than the stocks and stones whose fashioning it claimed to control. Thus were the gods of mortals endowed with the forms and frailties of the flesh. And so it is that Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 140 of Science and Health, with all her marvelous power of spiritual penetration, "In the beginning God created man in His, God's, image; but mortals would procreate man, and make God in their own human image. What is the god of a mortal, but a mortal magnified?"

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