PERSPECTIVE ON THE NEWS August 18, 1980 Issue

Divine cause overrules disaster

Prominent in the life and teaching of Christ Jesus is his unfailing reliance on God as true cause, as the omnipotent Father, the divine Principle that governs all. Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is here: harmony is the eternal order of all being. The Christ reveals this harmony and order to receptive human consciousness. One can reasonably assume that to Jesus, discord of any kind was seen as a manifestation of human ignorance of God and His loving control of man and the universe. To Jesus, disaster—whether in the body or caused by forces of nature—was an opportunity to prove the constancy of God's care.

At one point, when he saw a man who had been blind from birth, his disciples reasoned that since the blindness was an apparent fact, it had to have a cause. Searching for an explanation, they asked, "Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?"^{John 9:2;} But the Master refused to concede that this condition—this personal disaster—had a justifiable cause. Instead, he saw it as a demand to make the works of God manifest, and he did so. He healed the man.

The blindness was not a condition of the man of God's creating; it was not produced through the operation of divine law. It was an example of mental error concerning cause—displayed in this case through the body. So it is with all disasters, whether afflicting a person or a population. They are not the product of God's government. They are a display of the ignorance of mortals, who attribute power to material forces and fail to recognize that God alone controls all in continuing dynamic perfection and harmony.

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