Part 7 (2/2)

But Christian Science parts company soon enough with this great fellows.h.i.+p of dreamers and philosophers and takes its own line. It affirms consciousness and its content to be the only reality; it affirms the divine Mind to be the ultimate and all-conditioning reality; it affirms love and goodness to be the ultimate qualities of the divine Mind, but it meets the problem of sin and evil by denying them any reality at all. (Here it is in more or less accord with certain forms of mysticism.) But even as Christian Science cuts this Gordian knot it creates for itself another set of difficulties and involves itself in those contradictions which will eventually be the undoing of it as a philosophy.

_It Undertakes to Solve the Problem of Evil. Contrasted Solutions_

What Christian Science is seeking is an ideal order with a content of unqualified good and it secures this by denying the reality of every aspect of experience which either challenges or contradicts its own idealism. What is distinctive, then, in Christian Science is not its affirmations but its denials. All systems of philosophic idealism face practically the same problem and offer various solutions. They most commonly resolve evil of every sort--and evil is here used in so wide a way as to include sin and pain and sorrow--into an ultimate good.

Evil is thus an ”unripe good,” one stage in a process of evolution which, when it has had its perfect and all-transforming way, will reveal both moral and physical evil to have been no evil at all but simply aspects of life, trying enough at the time and puzzling enough when taken by themselves, but having their own distinct and contributory value when considered in their relation to the final whole. Such an approach as this does not in any wise diminish for the individual either the reality of pain or the unhappy consequences of sin, but it does ask him to judge the wisdom and love of G.o.d not by their pa.s.sing phases but by their outcome in the wealth and worth of character.

Robert Browning sang this st.u.r.dily through a long generation riding down its difficulties by the sheer force of an unconquerable optimism and subduing argument to lyric pa.s.sion.

”The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.

”And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence For the fullness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?

Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?

Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?”

Others affirm the self-limitation of G.o.d.[30] In His respect for that human freedom which is the basis of self-regulated personal action and therefore an essential condition of character, He arrests Himself, as it were, upon the threshold of human personality and commits His children to a moral struggle justifying the inevitable incidents of moral defeat by the greatness of the ends to be attained. A vast deal of what we call evil--broadening evil to include not only moral defeat but also pain--is either a consequence or a by-product of what Henry Churchill King calls the fight for character. Such a solution as this is consistent with the love of G.o.d and the moral order; whether it is consistent with a thoroughgoing monism or not is another question. William James doubted it and so frankly adopted Pluralism--which is perhaps just a way of saying that we cannot reconcile the contending forces in our world order with one over-all-controlling power--as his solution of the problem.

[Footnote 30: Walker, for example, in his extremely suggestive Spiritual Monism and Christian Theism.]

Josiah Royce has valiantly maintained, through long and subtle argument, the goodness of the whole despite the evil of the incidental. ”All finite life is a struggle with evil. Yet from the final point of view the Whole is good. The Temporal Order contains at no one moment anything that can satisfy. Yet the Eternal Order is perfect. We have all sinned, and come short of the glory of G.o.d. Yet in just our life, viewed in its entirety, the glory of G.o.d is completely manifest. These hard sayings are the deepest expressions of the essence of true religion.”[31] He finds the root of evil in the dissatisfaction of the finite will--a dissatisfaction which on the other hand is the secret of the eventual triumph of good.

[Footnote 31: ”The World and the Individual,” Royce, Vol. II, Chap.

9--pa.s.sim.]

We suffer also through our involution with ”the interests and ideals of vast realms of other conscious and finite lives whose dissatisfactions become part of each individual man's life when the man concerned cannot at present see how or why his own ideals are such as to make these dissatisfactions his fate.” We suffer also through our a.s.sociations with nature, none the less ”this very presence of evil in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order.” He dismisses definitely, in an argument still to be quoted, the conclusion of the mystic that an ”experience of evil is an experience of unreality ... an illusion, a dream, a deceit” and concludes: ”In brief, then, nowhere in Time is perfection to be found. Our comfort lies in the knowledge of the Eternal. Strengthened by that knowledge, we can win the most enduring of temporal joys, the consciousness that makes us delight to share the world's grave glories and to take part in its divine sorrows,--sure that these sorrows are the means of the eternal triumph, and that these glories are the treasures of the house of G.o.d. When once this comfort comes home to us, we can run and not be weary, and walk and not faint.

For our temporal life is the very expression of the eternal triumph.”

One may gravely question whether philosophy has ever so completely made out its case as Professor Royce thinks. He is affirming as the reasoned conclusion of philosophy what is rather a faith than a demonstration, but none the less, all honest thinking has. .h.i.therto been brave enough to recognize the reality of evil and to test the power of G.o.d and His love and goodness not by the actuality of present pain, or the confusion of present sin, but rather by the power which He offers us of growing through pain to health or else so bearing pain as to make it a real contribution to character and of so rising above sin as to make penitence and confession and the struggle for good and the achievement of it also a contribution to character. So St. Paul a.s.sures us that all things work together for good for those that love G.o.d. ”The willingness,” says Hocking, ”to confront every evil, in ourselves and outside ourselves, with the blunt, factual conscience of Science; willingness to pay the full causal price for the removal of the blemish; this kind of integrity can never be dispensed with in any optimistic program.”[32]

[Footnote 32: ”The Meaning of G.o.d in Human Experience,” p. 175.]

Sir Henry Jones takes the same line. ”The first requisite for the solution of the contradiction between the demand of religion for the perfection of G.o.d, and therefore the final and complete victory of the good in the other, is the honest admission that the contradiction is there, and inevitable; though possibly, like other contradictions, it is there only to be solved.”[33]

[Footnote 33: ”A Faith that Enquires,” p. 45.]

_The Divine Mind and Mortal Mind_

Christian Science solves this problem, as has been said, by denying the reality of evil, but since we have an abundance of testimony to pain and sickness, Mrs. Eddy goes a step farther. She denies the reality of the testimony of the senses wherever pain and sickness are concerned.[34]

(Mrs. Eddy's denial of the reality of sin is hardly parallel to her denial of the reality of physical ills.) And here the word comes in which is made to carry a heavier load than any one poor word was ever burdened with before. All that is involved in the recognition of physical ills and indeed all that is involved in the recognition of the material side of existence is error. (Once fairly on her road Mrs. Eddy makes a clean sweep of whatever stands in her way.) What one may call the whole shadowed side of experience is not only ignored, it is denied and yet before it can be explained away it has to be explained. It is, in brief, for Mrs. Eddy and her followers the creation of mortal mind.

Mortal mind, she says, ”is nothing claiming to be something; mythology; error creating other errors; a suppositional material sense; ... that which neither exists in science nor can be recognized by the spiritual sense; sin; sickness; death.”[35]

[Footnote 34: ”Science and Health,” last edition, pp. 108, 120, 293, 488.]

[Footnote 35: _Ibid._, p. 591.]

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