PERHAPS no teaching of Christian Science is more misunderstood and resisted than that of the unreality of evil, and this fact is quite explicable when we remember that most people reach their conclusions through sense experience rather than through the processes of logical thought, and that the opinions of the educated as well as of the commoner are largely determined by the subtle influence of religious prejudice. It is none the less pitiful, however, to find religious writers in this late age playing into the hands of the enemies of a spiritual interpretation of nature and of life by their failure to discriminate between that which seems real to men and that which is real to God.
In a "Lenten Meditation" by the editor of a prominent religious journal which lies before us, it is said of Jesus, "He did not flee from the horrors of sin, defiling life at its fountain sources, because he thought it an illusion . . . he knew that sin was a great and terrible reality, and he sought the companionship of God that he might return armed and equipped for the long warfare which should finally destroy it." This covert criticism of the misapprehended teaching of Christian Science well illustrates the illogical and self-confusing concessions which religious writers sometimes make to a crass material sense in their inglorious effort to ridicule the teaching of a divine idealism.
Let us note the thought expressed in this instance. Sin, it is declared, is a great and terrible reality which defiles life at its source, but which is finally to be destroyed. The Psalmist said, "With thee [God] is the fountain of life," and in harmony with this thought of God as the source of all being, St. John has said that without His going forth (the Logos) "was not anything made that was made." Theoretically the Christian world has always accepted this teaching, that there is one God who is the only cause and creator, or as more modernly phrased, one infinite Spirit whose activity constitutes and maintains all being.
