Article January 28, 1922 Issue

Warfare

MARY GILES POST

If it were possible to speak a good word about error, one might assert that error is a consummately good fighter. But even this statement would immediately be stripped of its seeming praise, since all that error ever fights against is goodness, and it is self-evident that no fighter of good could really be a good fighter. Every characteristic which makes for the destruction of good is necessarily devoid of any excellence. Yet whoever has striven to eliminate a sense of the reality and potency of evil has seemed to be struggling with an adversary of no mean caliber. To defeat this enemy requires not only the exercise of all of man's reflected strength, but also the watchfulness, the wisdom, and the complete thoroughness which are involved in the command given by Jesus to love the Lord with all the heart and soul and mind. Jesus to love the Lord with all the heart and soul and mind.

Of course the basic truth expressed in the statement, ''I am the Lord, and there is none else,'' disposes of the contradictory belief in the existence of any other power. Here the question naturally presents itself: Since the allness of omnipotent good necessitates the nothingness of its opposite, evil, why should there be any need to fight at all? Logically, there is nothing against which to fight. That is perfectly true, and when the unclouded comprehension of this fact abides with one, when one is never tempted for an instant to believe in any causation outside of infinite Life, all the fight that ever was will have been won. At that moment heaven is attained, for heaven is reality manifest. Until that constant clarity of spiritual vision is achieved, the warfare goes on,—not, indeed, with any adversary having the might of actuality but with the preposterous shadows of utter falsity, impostors claiming for themselves every prerogative of Deity.

On page 17 of ''Unity of Good'' Mrs. Eddy makes this statement: ''A lie has only one chance of successful deception,—to be accounted true.'' Now, the whole purpose of Christian Science teaching is the annihilation of that one chance. Of course the lie, or error, comprises the reversal of the statements of truth. Thus, the fact that man is the spiritual, perfect, and undying likeness of God, Spirit, reversed, declares man to be material, imperfect, and mortal. Again, the truth of one supreme and good intelligence must take the place of the lie, or false belief, of an antagonistic evil mind, or minds. What the apostle Paul says of this warfare against the lie makes clear his understanding that in whatever form evil seems to be present, it is, first, last, and all the time, only a wrong condition of thought. Take his own sentence, ''We do not war after the flesh: (for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) casting down imaginations.'' That word ''imaginations'' is the kernel of the true logic applied to the entire problem of evil. It presents the only consistent explanation of every apparent verity which contradicts the allness of good, or as Paul defines them, ''every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God.'' ''That exalteth itself" is significant. A lie, sustained only by a lie! A bubble inflated to the semblance of a universe by a momentarily "successful deception"! The end of the verse states the inevitable result of the overthrow of these imaginations, or false conceptions, that is, their replacement by thoughts expressing entire obedience to revealed Truth.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

Christian Science versus Human Will