Human suffering means more than pain; it has ever been a most perplexing problem. Though recognized by all Christian people as the sequence of sin, it is found to conform to no law of ethical fitness in its visitations, the good and the bad alike being subject to its pangs. The assumption that it helps more than it hinders has always been disputed, but if its beneficence were not to be questioned then its prerequisite sin would not be unwarranted, and God would be made responsible for that which He has ever condemned as an abomination! Those who have been taught to believe in the reality of evil and hence of disease, and who yet believe that there is one God in whom all things consist, have been logically compelled to look upon suffering as a part of an ordering of nature which must subserve some righteous end, and therefore it must somehow be harmonized with that concept of the creator which declares Him to be all-wise, all-powerful, and all-good.
In contrast with all this puzzling, self-contradictory thought, Christian Science teaches that suffering is the incident and outcome of false human sense alone; that it registers the dis-ease of untruth; that it is not constituted nor consented to by God, and that it is to be escaped from as we awaken to our true spiritual life, the kingdom of heaven within. The disorder and disharmony growing out of a belief that two times two are five may be said to result from the fact that two times two are four; nevertheless, we know that there is no fellowship or relation between these two states of thought, since one is true, the other false; one real, the other unreal. Thus, too, it may be said that because divine truth, the right idea, is harmonious, untruth, the false sense, is inharmonious or dis-eased; but it is apparent that they too are wholly unrelated and that God, the infinite Life, Truth, and Love, can no more cause sin and its consequent suffering than light can cause darkness.
Those who look upon suffering as an instrument of good are likely to regard the dissenter as neither brave nor broadminded, since, as they declare, he shows more consideration for his creature comfort than he does for his spiritual advance; he whimpers and tries to run away when God would lead him to school. They are disposed to say that Christian Scientists give altogether too much attention to the subject of physical healing; that they should take a "larger view," get away from the personal and temporal aspects of experience so that the serviceability of pain, in the light of the racial issues involved, may appear.
