A FALSE sense of things furnishes the only hiding-place for the pretence of evil. It makes many a daring sally from this covert, but it must needs maintain constant connection therewith, for only here can its false claim of power be made. Since evil thus grows out of unwarranted belief, it is manifest that deliverance from it calls, first of all, for definition: the attainment of a right understanding of fundamental truth. The antiquated and dust-laden cobwebs of misapprehension must be cleared away, that Truth's eternal light—divine ideas—may appear in consciousness. This is a salient feature of the teaching of Christian Science, which, as Mrs. Eddy has said, "disentangles the interlaced ambiguities of being, and sets free the imprisoned thought" (Science and Health, p. 114).
The necessity of making careful discrimination respecting the logical content and relations of our notions about things, will speedily appear to one who undertakes to think his way through the prevailing ideas concerning law. In human experience, and hence in human thought, law stands very largely for the restraint of evil-doers, the endeavor to beget repressive fear through the assertion of extraneous might. It acts from without and is the apparent explanation of the afflictive penalties which have to do with our moral education. Law is also thought of as being made manifest in the destructive phenomena of animal impulse, of storm and blight, and of the hereditary transmission of disease, and many would have us think that such evils are for some beneficent purpose, since, as they erroneously aver, the law which effects their increase is identical with that which multiplies the good. The good and the evil experience are mated in order and method, say they, and both must therefore be pulling in the line of racial advance, however impossible it may be for us to make this seem reasonable or right. Those who have been taught to believe in one cause and creator, and in the reality of evil, have indeed had no alternative but to conclude that evil comes under the scope of divine provision: that God legislates for the realm of darkness no less surely than for the realm of light. In this false thinking the infinite good is thus made responsible for that which is at war with harmony and peace, and in its extremity man-made theology has gone so far as to maintain that though the transmission of disease result in the unspeakable torture of tender innocence, nevertheless the law which determines these things is a divine enactment and has its place in a righteous economy. In other words, the kingdom of heaven being thus regarded as "divided against itself," this condition of things must be accepted as legitimate!
The Greeks of the Golden Age entertained a higher sense than this of the nature and domain of law, for, as Professor Butcher, a scholarly interpreter of their life, informs us, they did not think of law as an alien force, a constraint externally imposed, but as a part of their being, "the representative of their true rational self, the image of their moral life; not the denial of individual freedom, but its realization." It was the highest reason and conscience expressing itself in articulate form. Surely Paul might have commended his hearers on Mars Hill for their sense of law, as he did for their devotion to "deity reverencing," and yet how incomparably more noble was his own apprehension of the nature of law as he has expressed it in his epistles to the Romans and the Galatians, to whom he declared it to be "spiritual," and therefore holy; that to which the carnal mind is not subject, "neither indeed can be." It is the impulse and orderliness of the manifestation of divine Principle, the infinite good, and it is fulfilled in the activities of Love alone.
