Editorial July 4, 1942 Issue

On Believing Impossible Things

Peter V. Ross

Most readers whose attention is arrested by the above caption will recall that strangely stimulating story, "Through the Looking Glass," written by Lewis Carroll half a century or more ago. They will recollect the dialogue therein between Alice and the White Queen, in which Alice argues that one cannot believe impossible things; whereupon the Queen boasts that sometimes she has believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Doubtless many a person, without special claim to cleverness, has surpassed the Queen in this line of endeavor, because the capacity of mortals to believe the impossible is prodigious. Out of that unexplainable perversity come their confusion, their limitation, their mortality itself. For example, what mortal does not believe in evil? Yet to pure intelligence, evil is an impossible conception. Divine Mind, God, certainly cannot conceive evil or behold it. Nor can man in His image know evil or be tempted by it. Indeed the thing is nonexistent. Bold assertions are these, admittedly, but the truth is famous for effrontery.

Here Mary Baker Eddy, who brought Christian Science into the world, affirms with her usual searching insight and commanding courage, "To get rid of sin through Science, is to divest sin of any supposed mind or reality, and never to admit that sin can have intelligence or power, pain or pleasure" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 339).

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