THE eighth chapter of St. John may be thought of as a kind of epitome of the gospel teaching. In the story of the woman taken in adultery we have an uncovering of the universality of sin, of human unfitness to judge, and of Love's all-inclusive compassion. This is followed by the Master's declaration of his relation to the human problem, that he had come as light in the world, a witness to Truth, the saving efficacy of which is revealed in his further statement respecting the nature of evil, "the devil,"—that it is a falsity, "a liar, and the father of it."
This disclosure of the untruth, hence unreality of evil, adequately answers two of the most searching and insistent religious questions, namely, that respecting the relations of good and evil, and that respecting the way evil is to be overcome. Jesus here identifies evil as wholly negative, the opposite of good, as having the same relation to truth that darkness has to light. It is thus made apparent that escape from evil, all the inharmonies of human experience, is simply an escape from false belief and its consequences. Though logically deduced from our Lord's specific statement, this point of view, as reaffirmed in Christian Science, has seemed heretical to many. Indeed, it is still so classified by those who have been ecclesiastically educated away from that simple and natural understanding of the Master's words which is being proved efficient today in the healing of sickness, even as it was in the first century at the hands of the apostles.
The doctrine of atonement, the creedal teaching as to the philosophy of salvation, generally accepted by Christian believers, is confusing because it is not in harmony with that concept of God which the church has always maintained. It calls on men to separate themselves from that which it teaches is a part of the nature of things, the inevitable outcome of a divinely instituted order, and declares that the demand of divine justice is met, and the dignity of divine law is maintained, only when the suffering of innocence is voluntarily substituted for the suffering of guilt. The moral sense of mankind has always rebelled against this substitutionary thought, because it mars the concept of Deity and would be intolerable in human experience. An assertedly divine order ought surely to seem exemplary and workable, but the mere intimation that parents consent to the punishment of a good child in order that they might have a creditable basis for the forgiveness of a bad one, would beget not only prompt protest but righteous execration!
