Editorial October 31, 1925 Issue

Destroying "the popular gods"

Duncan Sinclair

Mrs. Eddy was one of the plainest and most forcible of speakers when she was dealing with the errors of mankind. Her understanding of Truth was so pronounced that she was fearless in her exposure of the claims of evil. Because she knew God to be infinite good,—demonstrably so,—she knew that evil is unreal; and this knowledge gave her the courage to denounce evil in its every form, regardless of how its claims to reality might be believed in by mortals. Her intense faith in God brought to her side numerous friends, and her unrelenting exposure of and opposition to evil arrayed against her an even more numerous body of so-called enemies; but she swerved not at all from her task of making known to the world the great truths which had been revealed to her.

Mrs. Eddy on page 347 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" refers to sin, sickness, and death as "the popular gods." And can any one take exception to her language when it is remembered how enormous is the sway the trio exercises over mankind? Sickness and sin seek to dog the footsteps of men during all their earthly life, and death stalks behind them like a grim specter, their presence being accepted, generally, as inevitable. So strongly do the great majority of men believe in the actuality, in the reality, of sin, disease, and death that these are well designated by Mrs. Eddy as "the popular gods."

Now the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, when she used the expression, was not by any means sneering at the woes of mankind. She had drunk too deeply of these woes herself to be anything but sympathetic toward suffering humanity. But her own suffering had been turned into gladness through her discovery of the allness of God, good, and the unreality of evil, for the discovery had restored her to health by enabling her to see that sin, sickness, and death were naught but illusions of material sense, which could be overcome by the understanding of the Christ. Thus she writes on the page of Science and Health referred to above: "If Christian Science takes away the popular gods,—sin, sickness, and death,—it is Christ, Truth, who destroys these evils, and so proves their nothingness."

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