OCCASIONALLY the student of Christian Science has to deal with an objection or criticism couched somewhat as follows : "You say that good is the only reality, and that the real man—the man of God's creating—is absolutely good, so that it is impossible for him to do evil; what, then, becomes of the freedom of the will if a man is a mere automaton, incapable of choice? What virtue is there in doing good or in being good if that condition is inevitable?" This false sense alike of "freedom" and of "will" implies a power apart from and unlike God, therefore this objection is really but a variant of that familiar query, "What is the origin of evil?" Precisely as one must reply that there is no origin to evil, because evil is nonexistent as an entity, and as a false belief has no origin, cause, or principle and can have none, so one is obliged to reply that in the false sense in which the objector uses the words, there is no freedom of the will.
The true sense of "freedom" and of "will" is perverted when we turn from the freedom and the will which characterize God to seek the counterfeits of both as they appear in mortals. Certainly no one would claim that God is not free, nor ask for man a greater degree of freedom than the infinite freedom of God. The freedom of God's will is the only freedom and the only will that Christian Science recognizes, precisely as the only man which it recognizes is the man who reflects that will in all its freedom. Since God is unchangeably God, infinite good, the freedom of the will which God possesses cannot by any possibility be a freedom to choose between good and evil, for God could not choose evil and remain God, good. Once it is seen that God is infinite good, that He is the infinite and therefore the only reality, and that He is eternally changeless, the doctrine of the freedom of the will leaves its false premises, inherent in the mistaken theory of a mind both good and evil and therefore under the necessity of choosing between them, for the true premises inherent in the divine Mind, infinite good, whose freedom does not consist in a choice between good and evil, but in the eternal manifestation through spiritual law of the infinite capabilities of good and of good only.
It ought to be evident, even to limited mortal perception, that the "freedom" which implies a possible choice of evil is a state whose outcome may be not freedom but bondage — the bitter bondage of ignorance, of self-deception, or of conscious sin. Is the man free who permits himself to give full expression to every impulse, whim, provocation? Then the freest people would be those in lunatic asylums, and—in all reverence be it said—Jesus Christ, who did not his own will but the will of the Father, must have had the least freedom of any man who ever trod this globe—Jesus Christ, who was able to declare finally : "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth" ! Does the child have the free use of the piano when he is thumping the keys at random and producing horrible discords? Is the great musician the slave of the piano or its master, when he gives an exquisite rendering of some great symphony thereon?
