WHEN Harold B said recently that "we are approaching a period in human history more momentous than any which has gone before," he voiced the conviction of many, and one of the legitimate grounds of this forecast may be found in the manifest significance of the present world struggle to the prevailing concept of Deity. The old query, "Why does a God who assertedly hates evil and has the power to prevent its awful tragedies, allow it to run riot in ways that shock the moral sense of even ordinary men?" is upon the lips of more Christian people today than at any other period of human history.
In the midst of a world-wide agony of sorrow over these things, the credibility of the answers given to this question by Christian apologetes in the past is being unreservedly challenged. Men are daring to ask about the consistency and rationality of venerated concepts and beliefs. They are frankly saying that they can no longer accept the declaration that a beneficent creator could be indifferent to that sense of right which asserts itself spontaneously in the hearts of all noble men. In a word, the concept of Deity which impelled a prominent Christian teacher to say recently that God's will and rule "involves failure as well as success, loss as well as gain, sickness as well as health, turmoil and sorrow as well as peace and joy," is being not only questioned but cast aside as wholly unsatisfactory, and this new mental attitude may prove to be one of the most significant results of the present war. The passing of the prevailing human beliefs about the divine participation in these world tragedies will bring about mighty changes, not only in religious habit and organization but in all that pertains to human welfare and advance.
Mrs. Eddy based all her teaching upon the declaration of the Master that to know God aright, to gain a demonstrably true apprehension of His nature, kingdom, and law, is to enter upon eternal life. For nearly half a century the healing and saving power of the realization that God, good, has no part in evil, and that all the calamities of mortal experience are but the phenomena attending the self-destruction of material belief, has been proven to the joy of unnumbered thousands.
