Editorial June 3, 1933 Issue

Holding Thought Steadfastly to Good

Duncan Sinclair

It may fairly be said that the human race is engaged in a titanic struggle for the mastery over what is termed evil. On every side we see this. Witness the efforts of men to overcome disease, restrain materiality, subdue sin, reverse the various forms of lack. They are engaged in this warfare because they believe that health and happiness can be won in no other way. The day is surely at hand when no one will argue on behalf of disease, claiming for it some virtue of its own; or for sin, believing that in some mysterious way good can result from evil! Such fallacies as these may still claim a following, but the majority of thinking people are persuaded that evil, by whatever name it may be called, must be overcome for humanity's sake.

The warfare with evil, then, goes on in various ways. Medical science combats disease after its own fashion, laying down what it designates as laws of health which, it declares, must be obeyed if health is to be secured; and always in its attacks upon it this so-called science regards disease as real. Moralists point out the ill effects of sin, stressing the necessity for overcoming it; and the great majority of them still regard it as real. It is similar with all the other forms of evil which claim to hold mankind in bondage; while men generally are striving to lessen this bondage, indeed to break it altogether, they are doing so under the mistaken belief that evil is real.

Now the Christian Scientist knows as well as any other the ravages which evil seems to produce among men. He does not minimize the apparent depredations of disease and sin, the suffering which these give rise to among mortals. Far from it. But Christian Science has given him a point of view with regard to evil entirely different from that presented by any other system of thought, a point of view which enables him to regard evil as unreal. The mode of reaching this viewpoint is simple. God, Christian Science affirms, is infinite good. There is therefore nothing unlike good in true spiritual being. Hence in reality there is no evil. That is to say, what men call evil, whatever form it may seem to take, is utterly unreal.

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