Editorial January 31, 1948 Issue

PUTTING OUT FIRE WITH FIRE

Paul Stark Seeley

There is something to the belief that fire is the chief ingredient of hell; the two are inseparable. But Christian Science shows that hell-fire is not the combustion of matter, producing heat and flames external to ourselves. Hell-fire is the mental heat within mortals, meaningfully defined by Mary Baker Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 586) as "fear; remorse; lust; hatred; destruction; affliction purifying and elevating man."

Do you ever get hot under the collar? Do you ever burn with bad temper, anger, resentment, or hatred? Do you ever feel consumed with fear and worry, or aflame with passion? Have you ever felt as though you were the fuel burning in the fires of affliction? If so, you have experienced in some degree hell-fire.

Some of these mental fires are sudden flashes of flame that flare up in tempery, angry, irritable thoughts and words, and then die down, later to reappear. Often they are the unseen, inaudible heat of fear, animosity, sensuality, and ill will that, unless extinguished, burn deeper and deeper into our lives and encompass us in a hell of our own unintentioned designing. "Only the makers of hell," writes Mrs. Eddy, "burn in their fire" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 160).

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PUTTING OUT FIRE WITH FIRE

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