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.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Testimony of Healing

When Christian Science was first seriously brought to my...