Thoughtful students of Christian Science are never more grateful for the illumination which has come to them, than when they note the uncertainty and mental confusion in which the many are yet immersed, for they realize how hopeless is the endeavor which others are so earnestly putting forth to reconcile reason and revelation while yet maintaining a tenacious hold upon incongruous, traditional beliefs.
A great body of sincere Christian people have ever found themselves face to face with an insuperable difficulty in their effort to adjust the dualism involved in the generally accepted declaration of the reality of both Spirit and matter, good and evil, to a fundamental postulate of every variety of Christian faith; viz., that God, Spirit, is the only cause and creator. The assumptions that there is one source of being, who is infinite good, and that like begets like,—these surely leave no place for anything unlike God; and yet matter and evil, the conceded opposites of Spirit, must, if real, have a divinely sustained being,—find their support and continuance in Spirit, and this contradiction has certainly done much to separate a great body of philosophical thinkers from all sympathy with a theology which begins with the statement that there is one cause of all existence, and ends with a dualism that is definite and radical!
In his latest work, "The Wonders of Life," Ernst Haeckel, who is ranked as the most eminent living representative of material evolution, severely criticises this dualism of the prevailing theological teaching, and in contrast therewith he avers that he is a consistent monist; that is, loyal to the assertion of the "universality of the law of substance, and the substantial unity of nature;" of which all the wonders of life are but forms, "whether you call this nature or cosmos, world or God."
