A Considerable portion of the average human being's time is spent in wondering "why things happen." To most of us life is apt to present a bewildering succession of incidents without a perceptible law of sequence. Superficially considered, they bear no logical relation to each other. Between birth and death, the two major experiences of finite existence, are interspersed a host of minor experiences as undirected and unaccountable as these two often seem. Restlessly, mankind seeks for reason in this unreasoning procession, but, save as the quest leads Godward and away from the love and fear of matter, the riddle persists. Much wonderment leads to many inventions, all of them, however, having one feature in common —sooner or later a "blind spot" that renders the sagest theory ridiculous, a missing premise, and therefore an impossible conclusion. Somewhere the inconsistency always lurks, generally glossed over or excused as an idiosyncrasy of Deity beyond man's feeble power to comprehend. For these theories and philosophies are based on the supposition of the reality of matter, and therefore they are successful only so long as they remain theories and the strain upon them does not come on that link that must ever be missing between the unreal and the real.
When the strain does come, whether in the form of catastrophe or triumph, theory and philosophy perish. Luck, fate, or the will of God is then commonly blamed or blessed for the results. Of these the first denies divine direction altogether, the second attributes the occurrence to a sometime antagonist and whilom accomplice of Deity, and the last perversely supposes a mind apart from man, often purposing man's ruin or destruction. The most plausible form of this blind belief in the will of an inscrutable and highly arbitrary deity calls pleasant occurrences the reward of virtue and unpleasant ones the punishment for sin. This has been a favorite persuasion of many, from the heathen to the Christian of to-day. It counsels an obedience that is fear and a devoutness that is propitiation. We find it in the Jewish thought of Jesus' time, evinced by his followers on more than one occasion. It was expressed unmistakably by the disciples in one instance and received a merited rebuke from Jesus. They asked of a certain man, "Master, who did sir, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?" In other words, Whom is infinite good, God, condemning by this torment, the tormented one because of some mysterious prenatal sin, or some other individuals through him for sins he never committed? Such a query is born of chaos and old night, and the only fit response is that triumphant reply of Jesus. "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him." With a further reminder to those about him that the Christ must be ever operative for good where the Christ is understood, Jesus simply and instantaneously healed the blind man, blasting in the very act all theories of the mystery of ill fortune and the wrathfulness of a cruel God.
Here and elsewhere, by both act and statement, Jesus proved forever irreconcilable the belief in good and evil fortune and the Christ-idea. He enunciated once and for all the explanation of our every human experience: "that the works of God should be made manifest." In other words, good and evil fortune are not conceivable as realities, as happenings with power in themselves for weal or woe. The phantasmagoria of human existence, then, can be in reality but one continuous occurrence, the opportunity to prove in our lives the goodness and might of divine Mind. Whatever depth of despair we are tempted to descend into, or whatever pleasant experience we are tempted to regard as merited or as beyond our merits, but one thing can truthfully be said of it: that in it or out of it or because of it must be made manifest the works of God. It has no other being than this. Faced by the evidences of our own sick and sinning thought, out of which our human experiences emerge, our cry should not be, "Who hath sinned?" but rather, "Let there be light!" As Christ Jesus declared for all time, "As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world"—the only true explication of the facts of being.
