Editorial January 17, 1920 Issue

Right Condemnation

Ella W. Hoag

Ever since Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and sin received the sentence of destruction which must inevitably be meted out to it, men have expected and feared condemnation. Because of a lack of understanding of God's law of life which is the law of right condemnation of sin and the inevitable annihilation of it, consternation has accompanied even the contemplation of this law. Men have been praying to be delivered from it, when the fact is that it is only through its righteous activity that they can ever hope for deliverance either from condemnation or from the fear of it. This law of God is His law of Love to the children of men, and they need but to awaken to this and put it into activity in their own thinking and living as Christian Science demands, in order to find the way of deliverance from all evil. Paul expressed the plaint of all men when he cried, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" He, however, quickly went on to say, "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord," and further adds: "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death."

Now so long as one believes in and indulges evil, there must always be united therewith the consciousness that sometime its ultimate destruction must occur, and hence sin indulged always includes fear of condemnation. Then each mortal can readily see that he is the arbiter of his own sense of condemnation. With the willingness to condemn sin, he need no longer indulge it, and without indulgence there is nothing left to be condemned. In Science and Health (p. 392) we read, "Only while fear or sin remains can it bring forth death." Mortals must admit the necessity of condemning sin before they can be freed from it. A lack of right mental condemnation of sin results in blindness to it, and thus one becomes its victim. A willingness, on the other hand, to recognize and condemn whatever is unlike God, can only be brought about as one accepts and learns to understand and demonstrate the perfect premise of the allness of God, good, and the consequent nothingness of His opposite. Right condemnation of sin, then, is the acknowledgment and proof of sin's utter unreality and undesirability,—of its complete nothingness. As one therefore begins to let this law of God hold sway in his own thinking, he sees that it is also the law of deliverance from and annihilation of all sense of sin.

Before Christian Science was revealed, Christians were tossed back and forth in their struggles to overcome sin in themselves and others. They were confronted with the dilemma which, while holding sin as real and pleasurable, at the same time constantly condemned men for sinning. Still, desiring to save the sinner, the sin was most often condoned, thereby frequently producing a worse sinner. As has been already stated, to be free from condemnation one must be free from that which deserves condemnation. John says, "If our own heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God." All the teaching of the schools has never shown men how to attain a heart free from condemnation. All efforts to attain personal goodness can never result in freedom, for from the ordinary theological standpoint of perpetually contemplating sin, it alone seems real and true, and therefore the greater the attempt to rid one's self of sin the greater the state of self-condemnation.

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