Article December 5, 1914 Issue

"The only sufferer"

HON. CLARENCE A. BUSKIRK

The genius of Mrs. Eddy, who is coming to be recognized in all the world as a very great religious teacher, often gives us, and perchance in a few words, an unforgetable glimpse into otherwise profound darkness and night, her insight proving an illuminating flash which pierces and dispels the densest clouds and gloom. Take for example the two following statements : "The equipollence of God brought to light another glorious proposition, — man's perfectibility and the establishment of the kingdom of heaven on earth." "Immortal cravings . . . establish the truism that the only sufferer is mortal mind, for the divine Mind cannot suffer" (Science and Health, pp. 110, 108).

None may reasonably deny the eternal fact of infinity. Its proofs are everywhere. It is a fundamental proposition in all the philosophical and religious thought of the world. Infinity must be absolutely free from all limitation, — a single lack would mean finiteness. Hence, infinity includes self-consciousness and intelligence, which surely are the best and most supreme things in the universe; and this means a self-conscious intelligence without limitation or lack, — eternal, absolute, supreme, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent divine Mind. No one would deny that thought and self-consciousness belong to man; therefore to deny them to the infinite would be to make infinity merely finite, that is, more limited than man.

Let us consider the subject from another angle. When the eternal fact of divine Mind is granted, it follows that divine Mind is exclusive because omnipresent, and that what we term finite intelligence, in so far as it expresses truth and reality, must be a reflection, or an effect, of the divine Mind. It therefore also follows that any intelligence which is antipodal to divine Mind can have no real existence, but is the mortal mind described by Mrs. Eddy in Science and Health and her other writings. This consideration does not weaken the argument for the existence of divine Mind as an eternal fact, since human intelligence, though it be false and illusive in many things, nevertheless has a divine similitude even in its imperfect reflection of the truth of being.

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