Article January 11, 1958 Issue

TOO PURE TO BEHOLD EVIL

LUTHER J. KINNARD

Throughout Biblical history consecrated prophets have arisen to declare, despite all evidence of the material senses, that the one and only living God is a God of good and not of evil. Such a prophet was Habakkuk, who, in the midst of oppression and religious depression, could lift his vision above the onslaught of the dreaded Chaldeans and gratefully pray to his God (1:13), "Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity."

In like manner, many devout Christians of today no longer accept the discouraging belief that a good God sends grief and sorrow to punish His children. This gradual change in Christian thought from the fear of a deity who creates both good and evil to the worship of a loving Father-Mother God leads to the question, How can a merciful God comfort the sorrowing, heal the sick, and forgive the sinner without even being conscious of these errors?

In "Unity of Good," Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, tells us how to approach this question reverently and spiritually. On page 4 of the remarkable article "Caution in the Truth," she writes, "To gain a temporary consciousness of God's law is to feel, in a certain finite human sense, that God comes to us and pities us; but the attainment of the understanding of His presence, through the Science of God, destroys our sense of imperfection, or of His absence, through a diviner sense that God is all true consciousness; and this convinces us that, as we get still nearer Him, we must forever lose our own consciousness of error."

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