Editorial March 19, 1921 Issue

The Absolute Beginning

Gustavus S. Paine

When everything seems to have gone wrong, one can turn to Christian Science, begin at the true beginning, and find relief from the evils of mortality. In such a case, a man may well ask himself, "What do I really know?" If he thinks himself miserable and disillusioned, he may hesitate even to believe that God exists. How then can he turn to and rely on God until he is convinced at least of the possibility that there is a Supreme Being? Already such a man has found the evidence of the physical senses baffling and unsatisfactory. On that evidence, God is supposed to be the source of evil, the inexorable cause of brutal anguish that is intended in some way to bring about good. It is a curious fact that many ordinary religious concepts of the last few centuries have grown out of the poetic interpretation of Milton and Dante, rather than out of the Bible itself. Materialistic imagination, along with strictly inductive, empiric investigation, has evolved a hypothesis of a mysterious power producing good and evil in constant conflict. To reject all this baseless supposition and accept the actual Principle of being, a man needs, therefore, to consider what he truly knows, regardless of the material senses, regardless of what he may have been led to believe in any way, and regardless of his own preconceptions.

Depending on the human senses, a man encounters merely illusion after illusion. Every one is familiar with numerous optical illusions, such as the convergence of track rails in the distance, the mirage on the desert, and what looks like the flowing of a stream uphill when one suddenly approaches it at a particular angle. If the senses can be mistaken in these ways, how can one have any more confidence in the results of observation through a microscope? The investigator with the microscope tries, of course, to correct his data by allowing for other considerations. At the best, however, his knowledge is human supposition, which at any moment further study may entirely reverse.

In order to prove that God exists, it is not enough, therefore, to look at the material universe, either extensively or intensively, and then to conclude that there must be a cause for all these seeming wonders. Belief in a cause for illusions is not a sure basis. No man, moreover, can be required to accept what some one else tells him. A personal assurance that the love of God has been experienced by many as a healing and regenerating force may have little weight to one who thinks himself a confirmed skeptic and cynic. Each one is entitled to prove for himself to his own positive satisfaction that there is true Principle. Such proof cannot rest on any vague intuition or suffusing emotion. The absolute beginning for scientific reasoning is spiritually logical and sure.

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