It is impossible to tell a lie about anything except the truth. Even a fairy tale is dependent upon some semblance of fact for its fantastic embroidery of human existence. Thus every great theological dogma is either a reflection of Truth, or else it is a counterfeit varying only in its measure of distortion. The famous allegory of the garden in Eden, related in the early chapters of the book of Genesis, is a case in point. Upon it scholasticism has built the entire fabric of dogmatic theology, with its foundations laid in the doctrine of the fall of man, and its superstructure reared in the teaching of the atonement in the sense of expiation. Realizing this it is easy to understand the alarm spread through the dovecotes of orthodoxy by the pretensions of natural science. Century after century the "Higher Criticism" was fought by "bell, book, and candle," by argument, or by persecution, but always with diminishing effect. As a result, in the year 1920, a canon of Westminster, preaching at Cardiff, before the members of the British Association, calmly discards the doctrine of "the fall of man" and deliberately refuses to find harbor in the theory of the allegory.
Five hundred years ago Canon Barnes would have gone to the stake for the ventilation of such a heresy. Fifty years ago he would have been overtaken by the cyclone raised by Colenso's exegetical adventures. Today his excursions and alarums are described as "courageous," and no more heat is generated by them than is natural to a controversial tournament in The Times. When the savage attacks made upon Mrs. Eddy for her teaching with respect to the fall are called to mind, thoughtful people will begin to revalue earlier criticism. For the fact is, that whereas Mrs. Eddy was engaged in blending the books of the Bible into a scientific entity, inspired by a metaphysical comprehension of the revelation of Christ Jesus, Canon Barnes is committed to an unwitting attempt to explain away the miracle by means of natural science. In other words, whilst Mrs. Eddy has saved the Bible by showing the miracle to be divinely natural, and so a demonstration of the absolute Science of Christianity, Canon Barnes falls back on an explanation of spiritual consciousness as derived, by way of matter, from electrons. This is the "new knowledge," the support of which causes the Canon "to abandon the doctrine of the fall and the arguments deduced from it by theologians from St. Paul onward," and as a consequence, whether he has faced the inevitable yet or not, either to return to Hume's definition of a miracle as a violation of a law of nature, or, after the manner of Matthew Arnold, to reject the miracle as Aberglaube.
It will be seen from this why the teaching of the unreality of matter occupies so dominant a place in the theology of Christian Science. Orthodoxy has linked together its theology in three capital dogmas, the fall of man, original sin, and the vicarious atonement. In order to bring orthodoxy up to the level of the demands of the "new knowledge," Canon Barnes deliberately sacrifices the fall and the whole of what he regards as the Pauline theology on the subject. This repudiation of the unity of the Bible is made in the interest of a theory which he summarizes as follows: "From some fundamental stuff in the universe the electrons arose. From them came matter. From matter life emerged. From life came mind. From mind spiritual consciousness is developing." Such a process of reasoning, of course, disposes of Genesis, whether as an allegory or not. But it is impossible to stop here. The new knowledge, with matter as the god in the car, has assumed control of the proceedings, and it becomes clearer than ever what Leibnitz was insisting upon when he wrote to the Princess of Wales, "Sir Isaac Newton says that space is an organ which God makes use of to perceive things by. But if God stands in need of any organ to perceive things by, it will follow that they do not depend altogether upon Him, nor were produced by Him."
