CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND SIN.
IN Mrs. Eddy’s “annual letter,” which was printed in the Boston Herald of June 24, she has the following to say concerning evil and sin:— Incorporeal evil embodies itself in the so-called corporeal, and is manifested in the flesh. Evil is neither quality nor quantity; it is not intelligence, a person, or a principle, a man or a woman, a place or a thing, and God never made it. The outcome of evil, called sin, is another nonentity that belittles itself until it annihilates its own embodiment; this is the only annihilation. The so-called visible sin should be invisible; it ought not to be seen, felt, or acted; and because it ought not, we must know that sin is a lie, an illusion, nothing, and only an assumption that nothing is something. We must not assume the position that sin is sin, and can take possession of us and destroy us, but that we take possession of sin with such a sense of its nullity as destroys it; it can have neither entity, verity, nor power thus regarded, and we verify Jesus’ words, that evil, devil, sin, is a lie, therefore is nothing, and the father of nothingness. In Christian Science love lays the ax at the root of sin, and destroys it on the very basis of nothingness. When man makes something of sin, it is either because he fears it or loves it. Now, destroy the conception of sin as something, a reality, and you destroy the fear and the love of sin; and there is nothing left of it, and sin disappears. A man’s fear conquers him in whatever direction it runs. It is self-evident that evil is not truth; then it follows that it is untrue; and if untrue, unreal; and if unreal, to conceive of evil or sin as real is sin in itself. To be delivered from believing in what is unreal, from fearing it, following it, or loving it, one must watch and pray that he enter not into this temptation—even as one guards his door against the approach of thieves. Sin is thought before it is acted; you must control it in the first instance, or it may control you in the second. To overcome sin, it must become unreal to us; and it is good to know that sin has no divine authority; therefore man is its master. I rejoice in the scientific apprehension of this grand verity. Upon this the Outlook of July 6 has the following excellent comments:— This doctrine that sin is naught, that it does not exist, that it is nothing, that to believe that it exists is itself sin, that at best it is but a negation—the absence of virtue, as darkness is the absence of light—constitutes at once the power and the vice of Christian Science. Who would not be glad to believe that there is no sin in the world? Who would not rejoice to believe that in his own life sin can be vanquished by simply believing that it does not exist? Who would not rejoice to be thus freed from all fear of sin and its consequences, and all conflict with sin and temptation, if only the deliverance could be real and permanent? This doctrine is not consistently stated nor logically followed out; but this logical inconsistency adds to its popular power; for when one revolts from the necessary conclusions, he is calmly assured that they are not conclusions. This was not the view of Christ, who bade His followers fear Him who hath power to cast both soul and body into the fire of Gehenna; this was not the experience of Paul, who wrote, almost as tho he had a prevision of Christian Science, “So fight I, not as one that beateth the air;” this was not the understanding of John, who wrote, “I write unto you, young men, because ye have overcome the wicked one.” Christ and the apostles suffered no illusion on this subject. They did not regard sin as nothing, nor did they teach their followers so to regard it. To them it was a very real and a very terrible entity. For ourselves, we wish to repudiate with all the vigor of which we are capable this pleasing but treacherous optimism. It is a very Delilah, who summons man to go to sleep in her lap with assurances that there is no enemy near, only that she may deliver him over to his enemy. Sin the Westminster Catechism defines as any violation of, or want of conformity to, the law of God; sin John defines yet more tersely as “lawlessness;” sin Paul describes as the supremacy in man of the lusts of the flesh over the higher will of the Spirit. Sin as thus defined and described is real, actual, aggressive, the terrible tragedy of human life. It is no mere nightmare, which will disappear when we awaken; it is no mere absence of goodness, which glides away noiselessly and without a struggle before our higher aspirations, as the darkness disappears before the sunlight. Sin is lawlessness; sin is the spirit of a self-will setting divine law at defiance, or the spirit of self-indulgence acting in serene indifference to law, as though there were no higher will than one’s own. Sin is to be feared; sin is to be fought; in one’s self and in society. The serenity which smiles and folds its hands and says sin is nothing will never conquer sin. This spirit will not close saloons, nor lessen gambling-halls, nor rescue fallen women, nor emancipate the slave, nor overthrow despotic government, nor purify governments that are corrupt, nor in the individual vanquish his appetite, his lust, his pride, his self-conceit, his self-will. Sin is real, actual, terrible, a spiritual reality. It is an incident of a world of men whose wills are free to follow or to reject God and goodness, and who often choose to reject both. It can not be argued out of existence by any such syllogism as, God is infinite and God is good, therefore there can be no evil. There is evil; and no philosophy can be intellectually or morally sound which denies its terrible reality. In this illusion lies the power of Christian Science; its doctrine of metaphysical healing is subordinate and secondary. There are a great many sweet and pious souls who wish to believe only good about mankind, and only pleasant things about life. They never read the novels, the past history, or the current records which depict in strong colors the evil passions of mankind and their consequences; they even think, or try to think, that whatever portrays immorality is immoral. Their motto is, Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise, and to them ignorance of the darker and more terrible aspects of life is always bliss. A philosophy which declares that there is no sin, it is only nothing, and no misery except in imagination, and none, therefore, which imagination can not cure, that all evil is a “mortal thought,” and to meditate on God as love, and love as infinite is a panacea, brings to such optimists a welcome relief from the pains and burdens of life. It is like an anodyne to one in pain; it brings no cure, but it brings a delicious forgetfulness. There are other souls whose bane is spiritual laziness. They would be glad to “sit and sing themselves away to everlasting bliss,” but they have no inclination to fight their way thither; they enjoy fondling their own aspirations, as the father likes to play a little while with his baby before the serious business of the day begins; but they have neither the courage to fight evil in others nor the resolution to fight evil in themselves. The doctrine that there is no evil to be fought, that there is no higher virtue demanded of us than fondling our own aspirations, that to dream of goodness is to be good, that to meditate on God as love is to conquer sin, comes to such dreamers as a welcome relief from the summons of reformers without, and of conscience within, to a strenuous life. The attractiveness of Christian Science is not in its prescription for physical disease; it is in the opiate which it furnishes to the troubled sympathies and the troubled consciences of the sensitive and the sentimental. But one does not need to read novels or daily papers to know that there is sin. God has revealed it in His Word, and that Word will reveal it in every heart, if the heart will give it entrance.