THOSE who believe in the reality of all that is witnessed to by material sense, and who also believe in God, are logically led to conclude that He is responsible for so-called natural law; and since this is indissolubly associated not only with many agreeable experiences, but with devastations and disease, is as manifest in decay as in growth, in death as in life, many are led to conclude that, however repellant the idea to their native instincts, it is probably true that the world as we find it is the best possible world in keeping with that larger divine purpose which as yet we cannot apprehend.
The inevitable outcome of this line of thought is a more tolerant attitude toward evil as a whole and its incorporation in the world scheme, a disposition to think that everything has its place in the one worth-while undertaking, the making of a man. This explains the fact that a very large body of Christian people have accepted material evolution as the philosophy of things, an order which, as they understand it, begins with the monad, with non-intelligent matter, and ends with the highest type of spiritual being, and which regards the manifestations of evil, the distresses and disharmonies of the world-life, as "good in the making." Although this theory affiliates with most materialistic and pantheistic philosophies, it cannot be said to be in keeping with common sense, since the immediate and universal recognition of mankind is, that in the order of cause and effect thought is always antecedent to thing; hence, until otherwise educated, the natural sense of relations would deny the proposition that the atom was first, and that intelligence is the highest secretion, the crowning product of cosmic stuff.
The initial statement of Christian Science is the initial declaration of the Scriptures, "In the beginning God, " infinite intelligence! It teaches that the real universe is the manifestation of this Mind to whose continuous but unlabored activity it witnesses. Science further teaches that the material sense universe is no less certainly the product or projection of a false mentality, the so-called mind of mortals, so that in the entire compass of its explanation of things it adheres to the proposition that mentality is forever first.
