How many of us, taught in childhood to repeat the Lord's Prayer, ever recognized the deep divinity involved in the above portion of it before we were awakened to the glorious light shed upon the Scriptures and the life of Christ Jesus by Christian Science? In the visible universe, as it appears in human consciousness, is it man alone who fails to do the will of God and to reflect His law?
That seems to be the implied belief in the old religious thought, for in the narrower sense of sin as commonly held in that thought, man alone is a sinner. But what does this involve? In the first place, it involves the impossible proposition that God has two wills or laws, one for Heaven and another for earth, for no Christian will contend that the conditions which exist in the physical world and the law which governs its phenomena are operative in the Heaven to which he looks forward. In the second place, it makes God responsible for all the suffering, misery, cruelty, and disasters which we see manifested throughout the physical world, and we cannot escape from this conclusion by saying that matter has its own laws, for this would be admitting that there is a power greater than God's power. We should be practically leaving God out of His own universe and falling into absolute materialism. Are we to understand, then, that Jesus' petition refers only to the doing of God's will by man, in earth as he does in Heaven, and that otherwise His will or law is being accomplished on earth? Even if we leave man out of the question, we are forced to admit, if this be true, that God's law of progress in this world is a life and death struggle for supremacy with the survival of the physically fittest. Can this be the law of a loving God such as Jesus revealed to mankind? If it is, we must concede that man, while on the earth, is also subject to this law and is likewise the helpless victim of chance and circumstance, of famine, pestilence, accident, and every kind of disaster which comes through the so-called laws of nature.
But is not all this the old Adam dream that came through the knowledge of both good and evil—the result of a false sense of being or existence apart from God, and a misconception, through the false testimony of a physical sense, of the realities of God's spiritual universe, which is His true kingdom governed by the perpetual, unchangeable law of harmony and love? If the testimony of the physical senses be true, why does not the study of matter and physical phenomena lead to a knowledge of reality?
