Article December 23, 1922 Issue

A critic, writing in a recent issue of your paper, appears...

Aaron E. Brandt, Committee on Publication for the State of Pennsylvania, in the—Wilkes-Barre

Record

A critic, writing in a recent issue of your paper, appears to have difficulty in reconciling such passages of Scripture, fully accepted in Christian Science, as may be found in the third chapter of the first epistle of John, verses eight and nine, which plainly declare that whosoever is born of God does not and cannot commit sin, while "he that committeth sin is of the devil."

The difficulty will vanish, as it has vanished to thousands of people, when, through an understanding of Christian Science, the distinction is drawn between material unreality and spiritual reality, between what the Scriptures call the seen and temporal and the unseen and eternal, and between many similar opposite terms contained in the Scriptures that could be mentioned if space permitted. A sinful sense personified is the only "he" that sins; and an erroneous sense of any kind can be corrected only by the truth, whether in science, philosophy, or religion. An erroneous sense is "itself" and nothing else, and its selfhood becomes nothingness in the light of spiritual understanding.

There is no ambiguity in Mrs. Eddy's definition of reality. When accepted, it solves the whole problem. On page 335 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," she says, "Reality is spiritual, harmonious, immutable, immortal, divine, eternal;" and she continues thus: "Nothing unspiritual can be real, harmonious, or eternal. Sin, sickness, and mortality are the suppositional antipodes of Spirit, and must be contradictions of reality."

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