Compassion, Limited

John B. Willis

The old-fashioned teaching about everlasting punishment can no longer be said to be popular, even among dyed-in-the-wool theologians. Yet one often comes upon indisputable evidence of a disposition to honor this antique dogma by subjecting certain persons and acts to unending condemnation. Even earnest Christians have been known to illustrate the fact that the momentum of habit often expresses itself in practice a long time after one's theory respecting the truly Christian attitude toward a given fact or situation has been fully righted.

How often has the saying, "Once a jail-bird, always a jail-bird," been given crushing significanse for some unfortunate at the moment when a word of confidence and hearty good will would have given him the courage to struggle on until he had worked out his problem. How often, too, have sisters and daughters, who perchance have been sinned against far more than they have sinned, been made to feel that the hand of every man, and especially of every woman, is against them, and that their blight is thereby made unremovable. The heart of "the new penology," and the explanation of the interesting facts being chronicled at Sing Sing and elsewhere today, is found in the proof being given to convicts that belief in human redemption has been substituted for the longtime belief in everlasting punishment. Little can be done for wayward men or women so long as their would-be helpers are governed by the belief that their sins cannot be pardoned, much less forgotten, by "good society."

The teaching of Christian Science finds an end to punishment in the infinite and eternal reality of good alone. It declares that while "the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts," the "process of higher spiritual understanding improves mankind until error disappears, and nothing is left which deserves to perish or to be punished" (Science and Health, pp. 497, 251). The habit of looking askance at an individual, and of warning others that he is "in error" and cannot be safely trusted, supplies painful proof that the spirit of "everlasting punishment" is yet extant.

The wrong one may do his brother man in thus maintaining an unjust mental attitude is immeasurable, and if any of us have thus sinned in the past, in heaven's name let us punish that fact by its everlasting quittance. The unbrotherliness of false sense is the one haunt and hiding-place of this evil, and Christian Science corrects the impulse by separating between man and materiality. It declares that the divine idea remains forever perfect; that no stain of error of any kind or degree can penetrate or affect aught but the seeming personality of false sense; that the true selfhood is inviolate, and cannot be made unclean or untrustworthy. This realization renders it possible to fulfil St. Paul's pertinent injunction, "Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted."

When we see a painter or plasterer covered with dirt, we know that it all pertains simply to his overalls, and so attach no significance to it. So, too, since evil belongs only to false sense, it must appear that when this sense is "put off" through the apprehension of divine Truth, all the stains go with it. A Christian Scientist who fails to be governed by this fact is surely missing the very heart of the truth for which he may be showing a zeal that is unholy because unkind. It is ours not to recognize any condition of thought or life as hopeless or incurable. Though surrounded by every claim of evil, we do well to remember Mrs. Eddy's significant statement in Science and Health (p. 476): "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick."

John B. Willis.

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