Possibly no question has been more generally misunderstood, or begotten more confusion and doubt, than that of the relation of suffering to divine law. Even many of those most familiar with the letter of the Scriptures are greatly perplexed, in view of the many statements therein which seem to make God responsible for the capacity in men to resist divine law, as well as for the suffering imposed on those who, when governed by impulses which they think to be divinely implanted, violate the requirements of law and incur its penalty. St. Paul discriminates clearly between the realm which is subject to the law of sin and death, and that which is subject to the "law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus." If the first mentioned were an expression of divine government, as most Christian believers have hitherto understood it to be, then there would be no escape from the conclusion that the sufferings of the innocent which make up so great a part of the human tragedy are directly traceable to the divine will and enactment, and we should be face to face with the inexplicable contradiction involved in the postulate of an infinitely holy being who legislates for evil and is personally responsible for that which our highest moral sense unequivocally condemns as wrong! Such a confusion of thought as to the moral integrity of any manifestation of divine law has led and must ever lead to mental chaos.
The First Commandment rebukes the beliefs of the ages in a power apart from God. This majestic mandate looms like a mighty white-domed peak, from whose sunlit summit every stream and rivulet of truth that has ever found its way into human consciousness has descended. Nevertheless, it was not until Christ Jesus disclosed the unlawfulness and unreality of mortal sense and its phenomena, by walking on the waves, healing the sick, and raising the dead. that thought was freed from the tangled theologies of material belief.
"The law," as St. John has said, "was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." In the oneness and allness of God, as expressed in the First Commandment, the Master found and presented to men the "grace" which is the heart of brotherhood. He recognized their common Father, common inheritance, common rights, and common interests. Here also he found that "truth" of being, which in its eternal intolerance of error frees the captive to falsity and thus heals the sick. Following him, Christian Science grounds the brotherhood of man, the true socialism, in the realization of the larger meaning of the oneness and fatherhood of God. On page 340 of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy writes, "The divine Principle of the First Commandment bases the Science, of being," and she goes on to explain that the realization of this truth of "one infinite God" not only "unifies men and nations," but that it "annuls the curse on man, and leaves nothing that can sin, suffer, be punished or destroyed."
