Editorial March 11, 1933 Issue

Choosing the Good

W. Stuart Booth

Without doubt if any thinking person were told that in every situation and experience he has the privilege of making his choice of either good or evil, he would unhesitatingly announce that he would always choose good. Thus he would naturally choose peace instead of strife, health rather than sickness, happiness and joy in place of sadness and sorrow, activity and abundance instead of limitation and lack, confidence and courage rather than doubt and fear. Yet, all too frequently, the experience of mankind includes such a proportion of the undesirable and evil that men are prone to believe that they are not privileged to choose and experience only the good.

Christian Science offers the cheering message to mankind that by means of its precepts men may learn how scientifically to choose the good and reject the evil; and, furthermore, that by applying these precepts in practice the legitimate desire and hope for good inevitably results in an encouraging lessening of evil and discord, and an increase of the manifestation of good and harmony in individual experience. Christian Science teaches that the Bible contains the explanation and exposure of evil and also its remedy. As is depicted in the third chapter of Genesis, mankind has been taught to believe that evil is as veritable as good—that man can know both good and evil. And mankind's acceptance of this belief has engendered a fear of evil which has outweighed their trust in good, and has misdirected their sense of pleasure, so that allegiance to good has all too frequently been temporarily displaced by evil's allurement and enslavement.

In explaining this, Mrs. Eddy was led to write in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 481): "The forbidden fruit of knowledge, against which wisdom warns man, is the testimony of error, declaring existence to be at the mercy of death, and good and evil to be capable of commingling." Thus "the tree of knowledge of good and evil" may be said to be the material belief that evil is as real as good, and therefore that both evil and good can and should be known as realities. The acceptance of this false belief by mankind appears to give evil a foothold in human thought which results in the expression in human experience of fear, limitation, discord, disease, death, sin—of all phases of evil.

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