Article December 3, 1927 Issue

Avoiding Faultfinding

CHARLES H. RING

On page 107 of "Miscellaneous Writings" Mrs. Eddy says, "Mankind thinks either too much or too little of sin." It fails to see the whole of error, and tends to conceive what it does see of it to be either pleasurable or troublesome reality, calling evil good and good iniquitous. It minimizes and excuses faults in a friend, while it magnifies and condemns these same faults in an enemy. It suffers the agonies of self-condemnation because of its own faults, and of self-righteousness because of the faults of others. Because the true righteousness of Christ Jesus was in excess of their own, the Pharisees in self-defense must have his virtue condemned as a fault. Because he recognized that the individual who is conscious of his sin is more readily healed of it than the one who refuses to see and acknowledge it, they would have him accounted the "friend of publicans and sinners," in the sense that he was in sympathy with their sins rather than their Saviour from sin.

Christian Science reveals the intricacies and subtleties of invisible sin, and strips it bare of every disguise. Faults become visible which before were invisible. Every thought which is not of God, which does not accord infinity to Him, immortal Mind, is seen to be an offense against Deity. When Christ Jesus said, "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God," he uncovered the conceit and deceit of the claim of so-called mortal goodness, and dealt it a vital blow.

Since Christian Science reveals more faults in mankind than it had ever dreamed of in its philosophy, it would seem as if the individual were in danger of being victimized by self-condemnation and self-righteousness, as indeed he would be, were it not that with the temptation there is the way of escape. For Christian Science not only uncovers the claim of sin, but shows this claim to be false, and therefore nothing at all. In her Message to The Mother Church for 1901 (pp. 12, 13) Mrs. Eddy says, "Evil is neither quality nor quantity: it is not intelligence, a person or a principle, a man or a woman, a place or a thing, and God never made it;" and, "The visible sin should be invisible: it ought not to be seen, felt, or acted: and because it ought not, we must know it is not, and that sin is a lie from the beginning,—an illusion, nothing, and only an assumption that nothing is something."

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