All ethical questions, all the important issues connected with human progress, are related to and bound up with a yet greater question, namely, that respecting the nature and allness of Deity, an answer to which must antedate the profitable discussion of every vital matter, since it conditions all rational thought. It is this fact that renders the maintenance of the perfection of the divine character, as taught in Christian Science, of such immeasurable significance. To realize and maintain that God is infinite Life, Truth, and Love, and to bring every assertion of our world-explaining philosophy and our inherited theological belief into conformity therewith,—this means the transformation of material sense, the new birth. On the other hand, it is apparent that if one's concept of God is awry, he is utterly unprepared to judge rightly respecting God's universe or manifestation; for when our basis of estimate and interpretation is questionable, then safe and satisfactory conclusions cannot be reached.
Speaking of the moral world, a great preacher has recently said that while God is the whole of being, "He is realized in human beings who are the parts;" that "human society, human history, the human race, is the realization of God." He who accepts this statement, together with the familiar aphorism, "Like causes, like effects," is compelled to define the human as he defines God. He cannot recognize confusion and contradiction in the nature of man, and deny its presence in the source of that nature; and yet this is the offense against logical thought which the many are constantly committing.
In no respect is the teaching of Christian Science more fundamentally corrective and healing than in its insistence that the ideality of the one cause and creator must be manifest in the ideality of all that He creates. It was the distinctive teaching of the Hebrew prophets, in contrast with the theology of surrounding nations, that, as the psalmist has declared, "the Lord is righteous in all his ways, and holy in all his works;" and this absolute ideality of the divine nature has been reaffirmed in every Christian creed. It has always been seen that if there is any least fleck of error in Truth, any imperfection whatever in the Supreme Being, His unity and immutability cannot be affirmed, even as the likelihood of the coming of chaos cannot be denied.
