Article June 26, 1920 Issue

Malpractice

Frederick Dixon

The one thing above all others for anybody to know about malpractice is that it is a lie. Having grasped the full significance of this, however, the next important thing to remember is that, in a realm of suppositional consciousness, such as that of the human mind, a lie claims to deceive, and to bring about, through its deceptions, all the ills attributable to evil. This being so, the work of the student of Christian Science is, first, to master divine metaphysics with a completeness which is proof against every argument of reality which evil can advance, and, second, to protect himself so thoroughly against the suggestions of evil as to make it impossible for them to impose upon him for one moment.

Now, in the study of Christian metaphysics, there is one thing carefully to be maintained, and that is what is known as an open mind. When Cowper wrote, "God moves in a mysterious way," he was merely giving expression to the groping of humanity for something it does not understand. Intuitively mankind feels Truth to be omnipotent, but the lusts of the flesh, education, and the suggestions of evil generally, so becloud this intuition that Truth appears an almost impalpable mystery. By declining to close its ears to a Science which, in its contradictions of the schools, seems positively unscientific, and to a gospel which, in its adherence to the Bible, challenges orthodoxy, the student pierces the mystery, and finds the rock of demonstrable Principle; and, standing on this rock, is secure against the flood of malice and the rain of suggestion which the great red dragon, conscious evil, is forever pouring out of his mouth. "This dragon," Mrs. Eddy writes, on page 563 of Science and Health, "stands for the sum total of human error."

Human error is, of course, made up of varying degrees of suggestion. The suggestion that there is life in matter is one thing; the suggestion that an individual can be deprived of his normal will power, and made involuntarily to sin is quite another thing. The first is the uneducated belief of the animal; the second is the criminal effort of the malpractitioner to gratify his hatred, passion, or revenge, or to do evil for evil's sake. The first suggestion carries the individual through the whole gamut of the pleasures and pains of the senses, and ends inevitably in death; the second is the work of a moral desperado, and whatever effects it may have must recoil most terribly upon himself. On page 564 of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy makes this hideous fact plain: "This malicious animal instinct, of which the dragon is the type, incites mortals to kill morally and physically even their fellow-mortals, and worse still, to charge the innocent with the crime. This last infirmity of sin will sink its perpetrator into a night without a star."

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