AN honest seeker for Truth has reverently propounded a series of questions and statements which embody such a large amount of prevailing inquiry respecting Christian Science teaching, that a statement in epitome of his queries, with some comments thereon, may prove helpful to the readers of the Journal. He said in substance,—
Christian Science teaches the unreality of evil, and that there are no such things as sin, sickness, and suffering because God is All and He is good, hence evil cannot be of Him; but if there is no evil, no sin, sickness, or suffering, what was Christ's mission on earth? If evil is unreal, what reason was there for the appalling sacrifice that he made? To say that Christ came to destroy a belief of evil does not help the situation, because the belief itself is a most astounding evil. In all his teachings Christ acknowledges the existence of Satan, the evil one. We do not abolish evil by simply ignoring it. Christ's warfare was not negative but active. He took a scourge and drove out of the temple— what, if not the evils which we are to attack and vanquish? The idea of Christian Science is sweetly and divinely beautiful until it seems positively and pointedly to contradict the real significance of Christ's mission on earth by denying the existence of evil.
Any one entertaining this line of thought is manifestly being held back by a very faulty understanding of what is really meant by the Christian Science teaching of the unreality of evil. First of all, it is to be seen that he has confounded the "corporeal Jesus" with the "eternal Christ" (Science and Health, p. 33). It was Jesus that suffered and sacrificed himself to demonstrate the unreality of evil. To "God and His Christ," the eternal Truth, there is no evil. Again, the existence of evil to human sense is confounded with the question of its unreality. That evil does exist in the form of false belief and, as the writer says, is an evil in the same sense that a lie is evil, no one can deny. But a lie, while it may be believed true, is not a reality; it is only a mere denial of or an assertion opposed to the reality of truth.
