Editorial October 8, 1949 Issue

MAN DOES NOT SUFFER

George Channing

No one need suffer for past mistakes. No one need pay the exacting price of retribution for having done wrong. Forgiveness of sins is a precious and immediate activity of the Christ. Consciousness, under the persuasion of the Christ, the spiritual idea of God, can be restored at once to its normal awareness of innocence. This spiritual awareness is always accompanied by the wiping out of all penalty for guilt. But the wiping out of penalty for guilt is wholly contingent upon wiping out guilt. That the latter can be accomplished is to the everlasting glory of Christianity as illumined by Christian Science, and to the everlasting comfort of all who avail themselves of it for release from the burden of condemnation.

Man is normally and undeviatingly innocent. He cannot swerve from his God-ordained activity of making manifest the presence of God. Man is the qualities of God, divine Mind, individualized. Those qualities are not capable of deflection from the purity of their divine source. Hence man can never deserve suffering. And in the inexorable justice forever meted out by the divine Parent, man never suffers.

The man of whom this is being written is the spiritual man, for instance the true selfhood of the reader of this editorial. He is the man comprised of spiritual ideas, the only man God made; hence the only man that exists. If therefore there appears to be another man, one comprised of impure, unspiritual qualities, that so-called man is an illusion. And the mind from which such qualities would be generated, if they could be generated at all, is also illusion. Its mesmeric claim to occupy the place of the Mind of man is sin, for this claim is an attempted usurpation of the place of God. God's infinitude is automatically a law that all illusion of presence that challenges, even in supposition, the reality of His infinite presence must suffer to the extinction of its own mesmeric awareness of itself. But God makes no law that man must suffer. On the contrary, man is His child, immune from harm or any form of unpleasantness.

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Editorial
THE "CHIEF BLOW"
October 8, 1949
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