Editorial March 14, 1936 Issue

Truth, not Travesty

Violet Ker Seymer

Both in his teaching and his healing work Christ Jesus gave evidence after evidence of the impotence of error when faced with the operation of Truth. Mrs. Eddy writes (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 288): "The great Galilean prophet was, is, the reformer of reformers. His piety partook not of the travesties of human opinions, pagan mysticisms, tribal religion, Greek philosophy, creed, dogma, or materia medica." These and other products of human thought claim authority in our day, but since their only basis, if so it can be called, is a material misconception of creator and creation, they are destined to vanish in the light of Christian Science—revealed truth.

One of the most obscuring and distressing arguments of material sense is that, whereas evil is present and inescapable, God, good, is a mystery, almost unknowable and unavailable. Because of their unreadiness to accept spiritual revelation, Jesus spoke to the multitudes in parables, but to his disciples he divulged their inner meaning, "because," he said, "it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven." His teaching did away with the mystery of both good and evil, and this enabled his disciples to heal on the basis of Spirit as did their Master.

Later, Paul did his share in lifting the veil of mystery evidenced in the inscription on a Grecian altar. On a certain occasion he said to the Athenians, "Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you." The transcendent light of Christianity shining forth in his missionary work uncovered the travesty of image worship, the practice of exorcising, and other superstitions, with the result that, at Ephesus, "many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed."

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