Christian Science demonstrates its value in the world by healing men of their diseases and sins; and this demonstration rests upon a profound and harmonizing philosophy which heals reason of its inner conflicts. Reason has the inherent three-fold capacity to know, to will, and to feel; but these elements in the human reason have from time immemorial been at strife, a strife which in its most painful aspects has shown itself in the old question of theodicy: How can a good God create a world so full of evil and sin, such as universal experience proves our world to be?
From the earliest times men have looked up to the heavenly powers as beneficent, and recognized in them the source of all earthly blessings. We know that this idea, in antiquity, received its highest form in the ethical consciousness of the Hebrews. Here, gradually, all forms of idolatry were thrown off, and the sense of a tribal god was in time, through the great lawgivers and prophets, replaced by apprehension of one infinite creator, the eternal will of righteousness. In the fulness of time this pure monotheism was freed from all tribal limitations and reached its complete expression in the gospel of Jesus, who saw in the eternal creative will of righteousness nothing other than the universal Father of all men. This supreme doctrine, that God is Love and manifests Himself through His created world to man, begotten in the divine likeness and image, has been the fundamental doctrine of the Christian Church from the beginning. In so far the volitional demands of reason for goodness—that is, the affections, the heart— are fully met and satisfied.
But there is that other side of reason, the intellectual, which demands to know, and searches out the truth of things; this also makes its claim to be satisfied; and when man, as a scientist and philosopher, comes to examine nature, God's creation, and history, which Divine providence is supposed to rule, he finds a state of evil and sin which is not consistent with the Divine goodness. Nature as materially viewed presents itself as a fixed, immutable system of law, seemingly indifferent to his prayers and incorrigible to his control, ruthlessly imposing upon him inescapable calamity and disease. And as to history, the wrongs, the injustice, the seeming triumph of might over right, and the successes of deceit and fraud, seem to prove God absent from His throne. To say that there is more truth than falsity and more good than evil, does not satisfy reason; for the false and the evil are still there and must either be regarded as blessings from God, and so not avoided, or patiently borne as inscrutable mysteries. But this only leaves us with reason unreconciled, a painful strife between the will of good and our knowledge of truth.
