The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-10-21
NEW AND COURIER MONDAY OCTOBER 2 l9oz


 disguise. If sin, sickness, and death were understood as nothingness, they would disappear" and finally "The more I understand true humanhood, the more see it to be sinless, as ig- norant of sin as Is the perfect Max er." But how does Mrs. Eddy ex- plain in a universe in which God is all, the awful fact" as she calls 1t of a human belief" to which sin seems real. In her chapter on Prayer" she speaks of our having a wicked heart'' which we are unwilling our neighbor should see"; she asks if we listen patiently" when "rebuked for a fault" and proposes as the test of prayer such a question as ''Do we pur- sue the old self1shness? etc." She even speaks in one moment of self-for- getfulness of our being free moral agents" Of course free moral agen- cy involves the possibility of sin; the very fact that one can choose between the higher and the lower means that there is the possibility of his choosing the lower. But Mrs. Eddy takes the liberty of denying that God can create being with such power of real choice and all that the Bible and human history and human conscience attribute to the selfish human will which turns to it's own way instead of to the way of Gods commandments, all the resulting tragedy and woe of | human disobedience-she attributes to an illusion of mortal mind; and then she tells us that mortal mind Is nothing claiming to be something''-- 1 that strictly speaking there is no such thing as mortal n1ind' because there is but one mind in the universe, and yet she is obliged to give this nothing ness name and under the limitations of the English language mortal mind" is the best she can do. But if the allness of God has not prevented this overwhelming drift of wrong thought and conviction, where is there any deeper mystery in It's failure to pre- vent wrong choice and wrong action and wrong character? As we saw last Sunday night, in mortal mind" Mrs. Eddy has all the residuum of inexpli- cable mystery on her hands and label- ing this mighty engine of mischief 1 Nothing" is of no avail And on the other hand to save man from any ina- putation of sin she has lost for him, in her teaching, any claim to character The Biblical, the historical, the psy- chological truth is that "All we like sheep have gone astray we have turn ed every one to his own way" we have r1lisused the august gift of free dom, we have sinned against heaven and in our Fathers sight and are nc more worthy to be called His sons l With unerring fidelity Oliver Wendell Holmes has drawn the lines of earth's real tragedy in his poer The Two Streams; he sings of how a pebbles edge on the water shed de- termines whether falling raindror shall join "Athabasca rolling toward l tho sun," or 'foam-fecked Oregon"
 So from the heights of Will
 Life's parting stream de5cends
 And, as a moment turns its slender
 rills
 Each widening torrent bends.
 From the same cradles side
 From the same mothers knee
 One to long darkness and the frozen
 tide
 One to the Peaceful Seal
 
 | An yes! Human life holds req 1 tragedies, because real issues are al stake. The fight for character and Fmoral victory Is no sham fight, the abuse of the awful gift of freedom Is no illusion; 1t may sink a man tt such loss of the values of life that the lnfallible Judge must say as TIe said of His betrayer "Woe unto him! | had been good for that man If he had never been born"
 Mrs. Eddys idea of salvation from sin which is only an illusion is ar awakening from the illusion; not re pentance for wrong doing, not tear, full seeking for pardon because of req guilt, not an act of grateful trust IT a holy but sympathetic Father re vealed in the holy and sympathetic Jesus, God who abundantIy pardon land whose pardon means the restoration of His disobedient child to trust, be cause that child through his new trus in the Father has been made trust worthy, For Mrs. Eddy there is nt justification, for man ls always just for her the just do not live by faith they live by understanding; not b, trust in a Saviour but by knowledge O a metaphysical principle. This is no scriptural salvation, 1t is gnostic sal }vation--salvation by gnosis or esoteri
 enllghtment as to the fIlusory natur, of matter and sin. An interesting comparative study might well be mad
 of Christian Science and the gnosti
 heresies of the second century wit
 their belief in a Supreme Being un Iconnected with matter, in matter a the source of evil and opposed to Got and in a Demiurge corresponding t ] Mrs. Eddy's "mortal-mind," connectet with matter and through 1t producing evil One of the closest correspond ences in this oriental doctrine share . by Mrs. Eddy would be that ma lneeds only to understand that nothin is the matter with him in order to b saved. Does it not empty the Gospe of much of it's content to say ''Th Son of Man came to seek and to dis abuse the minds of those who wer 7 under the hallucination that the } were lost"--can we imagine great jo in the presence of the angels of Go [ over one who had for time suppose himself to be sinner but came to SC that such had never been the case? ; And what shall we say of the Chris