Editorial January 29, 1927 Issue

God's Pardon

Duncan Sinclair

It is a radical mistake to believe that Christian Science makes light of what mortals call sin. Christian Science condemns sin whensoever and wheresoever it may appear to be in evidence, rebuking it with the word of Truth, and always with the desire that the one who is committing it shall be freed from its thralldom. The teaching of Christian Science on the nature of sin and on the method of divine forgiveness is very simple, and all may understand it as it is set forth in Mrs. Eddy's great work, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures."

On page 291 of Science and Health the following sentence occurs: "The suppositions that sin is pardoned while unforsaken, that happiness can be genuine in the midst of sin, that the so-called death of the body frees from sin, and that God's pardon is aught but the destruction of sin,—these are grave mistakes." It were well to give careful consideration to this highly important statement of Mrs. Eddy. And, first, how true it is that there can be no genuine happiness to the one who is indulging in sin! And how true, also, that often it is by no means easy to bring the fact home to the evildoer! Why is this? Because of the general and prevalent belief in sensuous pleasure, a belief which arises from the error that matter is real and that pandering to material sense brings satisfaction. Every form of sin is predicated upon the false belief that evil or matter is real. But matter or evil is unreal,—altogether unreal,—since God is infinite Spirit and infinite good. To regain his happiness the sinner must awaken to these truths, and also to the facts that sin cannot possibly confer any genuine happiness upon him, and that material sensations and emotions are of an entirely illusory nature.

Next, it will not do to imagine that sin can be indulged because of the theory that so-called death will "clean the slate," so to speak. That indeed is an idle and fallacious theory; because in reality there is no death, God, Life, being eternal. Moreover, as Christian Science teaches, at the moment of the so-called death of the body, a mortal thinks as he did before he passed through the belief of death, and has therefore still to be healed of his erroneous or sinful thinking. This surely points to the necessity of mortals overcoming all sinful thinking now.

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