Article August 20, 1921 Issue

The Naturalness of Good

ALMA LUTZ

"We know that all things work together for good to them that love God," was the message of cheer which Paul left to the world. He reminds us, too, of the Old Testament promise, "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." He had learned that good was natural, that man in the care of loving, divine Principle can look forward to good, and not to unhappiness, disaster, or misfortune. Paul was essentially a man of the world. He was not a sheltered dreamer unfamiliar with the vicissitudes of human life. He was a scholar, a man of affairs, and in the turmoil of world interest he was led to Christianity, which taught him the good news of the kingdom of heaven at hand, and thus he learned the ever availability of good.

Paul's experiences while he was preaching this good news, which had regenerated him, were not experiences of ease, comfort, popularity, and success such as the world calls success. On the other hand, there were hardship, hatred, suspicion to be faced continually. There were imprisonment, shipwreck, the bite of the serpent, but these did not overwhelm Paul. He saw them as opportunities to prove the power of God, good. Through all of these experiences he was able to know that all things do work together for good when one loves good, and it was this knowledge which sustained him and enabled him to be of such inestimable value to the world, not only in his own day but throughout the centuries.

The human mind is loath to believe in the reality of good and in the power, permanence, and allness of good, but clings tenaciously to the belief in evil as power, making for itself a dreaded devil of some sort. In most cases the devil of the cloven hoof and forked tail has been outgrown, but in its stead fear of evil still remains in thought to disturb and terrorize. Mankind looks for evil rather than good, expects sickness rather than health, believes in a law of accident and chance instead of turning to the all-powerful and just law of God. Joy, happiness, success, and health seem too good to be true. One of the fundamental truths of Christian Science is the unreality of evil and the naturalness and all-power of good. This does not mean that Christian Scientists go about blindly saying there is no evil or calling evil good. It means that in the divine Mind's creation there is no evil, no sickness, no sin, no death, and that Mind's creation is actually the only creation there is. Any belief in or fear of evil breaks the First Commandment. To human sense, however, evil seems very real and inevitable, and is destroyed only as this human sense yields to spiritual sense; in other words, as a man learns to see as the divine Mind sees, and reasons from cause to effect and not only from effect to cause.

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