Editorial January 13, 1923 Issue

Prophets of Good

Albert F. Gilmore

On page 388 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, we read: "The Christian martyrs were prophets of Christian Science. Through the uplifting and consecrating power of divine Truth, they obtained a victory over the corporeal senses, a victory which Science alone can explain." The lives of these divinely inspired men furnish fine examples of the triumphs of good over evil; they were true witnesses of the power of God to destroy whatever is unlike Himself, not, be it said, through His recognition of evil and its claims to reality and power, but through the great fact of His allness and infinite goodness, which in itself precludes the possibility of another presence, power, or reality. Through the ages, God has had His true prophets, seers who have lived so completely in harmony with Him as to be able to know the trend of human events. They have become forecasters of the future, their divine inspiration finding its proof in the accuracy with which they have foretold the events of subsequent human history.

While the great majority of mankind love good and believe in its presence, now and then one meets a person who apparently by choice dwells on the dark side of life. He revels in the anticipation of disaster, even forecasting untoward happenings, apparently with keen delight. Such a misanthrope, with clouds of depression and despair, darkens whatever company he may join. He would overspread the sky of human experience with doubt and gloom. Few persons of darkened vision are, like Job, able to reason through the wilderness of despondency, which they apparently have permitted themselves to enter, into the sunshine-land of joy and peace,—the haven of spiritual understanding. Christian Science has bestowed no greater blessing upon mankind than in providing a way out of the dismal swamps of despair in which men all too often allow themselves to wander, with no definite hope of escape from the maze of which constitutes so much of human experience.

Christian Science has accomplished much in lifting thought into the realm of certainty, where dwells reality, even into the atmosphere of divine Mind, which, with its perfect ideas, constitutes the universe of Spirit. Christian Scientists remove the seeming causes of doubt, depression, and despair by asserting, and in goodly degree proving, the unreality of all that is unlike good. What so positive proof of evil's unreality as its destruction, its utter banishment from the only state it ever had,—human belief! Eliminated from thought, evil is destroyed; it has no mandate, no power, no reality.

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