Editorial October 6, 1923 Issue

The Way Out of Suffering

Duncan Sinclair

On page 23 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy says that "suffering is an error of sinful sense which Truth destroys," and that "eventually both sin and suffering will fall at the feet of everlasting Love." Who believes that saying? Who understands it? Only those who have gained some knowledge of God as Christian Science reveals Him.

To the spiritually unenlightened human consciousness suffering seems very real, and the world appears to be groaning under it. Men and women and children are bearing in greater or less degree that which claims to be the common lot of all. And, meanwhile, many are sinking under the burden, often with a cry of despair on their lips. "It has been the lot of so many who have gone before," they say. "Why should it be different with us?" There are thousands living in the world to-day with hardly a spark of hope in their breasts, enduring the pangs of material suffering and under the belief that they must go down before an inexorable fate. To all such Mrs. Eddy's words, "Suffering is an error of sinful sense which Truth destroys," must come as a trumpet call to rouse them to the possibility of freedom.

Christian Science leaves one in no doubt as to the nature of suffering. Beginning with the declaration of the allness of God, Christian Science affirms that good is infinite and that harmony is therefore unlimited,—spiritual truths which cannot be refuted. Since they are facts, how then is suffering to be accounted for? Good being infinite, suffering, which is an inharmonious condition, cannot be any part of real being. Suffering must therefore be unreal. It is invariably linked up with material sense, which believes that matter and its derivatives are real; whereas spiritual sense alone declares the truth of being.

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