Unity of Good | Page 5

that
He could vastly improve upon His own previous work,--as Burgess, the
boatbuilder, remedies in the Volunteer the shortcomings of the Puritan's
model?
Christians are commanded to grow in grace. Was it necessary for God
to grow in grace, that He might rectify His spiritual universe?
The Jehovah of limited Hebrew faith might need repentance, because

His created children proved sinful; but the New Testament tells us of
"the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of
turning." God is not the shifting vane on the spire, but the corner-stone
of living rock, firmer than everlasting hills.
As God is Mind, if this Mind is familiar with evil, all cannot be good
therein. Our infinite model would be taken away. What is in eternal
Mind must be reflected in man, Mind's image. How then could man
escape, or hope to escape, from a knowledge which is everlasting in his
creator?
God never said that man would become better by learning to
distinguish evil from good,--but the contrary, that by this knowledge,
by man's first disobedience, came "death into the world, and all our
woe."
"Shall mortal man be more just than God?" asks the poet-patriarch.
May men rid themselves of an incubus which God never can throw off?
Do mortals know more than God, that they may declare Him absolutely
cognizant of sin?
God created all things, and pronounced them good. Was evil among
these good things? Man is God's child and image. If God knows evil, so
must man, or the likeness is incomplete, the image marred.
If man must be destroyed by the knowledge of evil, then his destruction
comes through the very knowledge caught from God, and the creature
is punished for his likeness to his creator.
God is commonly called the sinless, and man the _sinful_; but if the
thought of sin could be possible in Deity, would Deity then be sinless?
Would God not of necessity take precedence as the infinite sinner, and
human sin become only an echo of the divine?
Such vagaries are to be found in heathen religious history. There are, or
have been, devotees who worship not the good Deity, who will not
harm them, but the bad deity, who seeks to do them mischief, and
whom therefore they wish to bribe with prayers into quiescence, as a

criminal appeases, with a money-bag, the venal officer.
Surely this is no Christian worship! In Christianity man bows to the
infinite perfection which he is bidden to imitate. In Truth, such terms as
divine sin and infinite sinner are unheard-of contradictions,--absurdities;
but would they be sheer nonsense, if God has, or can have, a real
knowledge of sin?

Ways Higher than Our Ways
A lie has only one chance of successful deception,--to be accounted
true. Evil seeks to fasten all error upon God, and so make the lie seem
part of eternal Truth.
Emerson says, "Hitch your wagon to a star." I say, Be allied to the
deific power, and all that is good will aid your journey, as the stars in
their courses fought against Sisera. (Judges v. 20.) Hourly, in Christian
Science, man thus weds himself with God, or rather he ratifies a union
predestined from all eternity; but evil ties its wagon-load of offal to the
divine chariots,--or seeks so to do,--that its vileness may be christened
purity, and its darkness get consolation from borrowed scintillations.
Jesus distinctly taught the arrogant Pharisees that, from the beginning,
their father, the devil, was the would-be murderer of Truth. A right
apprehension of the wonderful utterances of him who "spake as never
man spake," would despoil error of its borrowed plumes, and transform
the universe into a home of marvellous light,--"a consummation
devoutly to be wished."
Error says God must know evil because He knows all things; but Holy
Writ declares God told our first parents that in the day when they
should partake of the fruit of evil, they must surely die. Would it not
absurdly follow that God must perish, if He knows evil and evil
necessarily leads to extinction? Rather let us think of God as saying, I
am infinite good; therefore I know not evil. Dwelling in light, I can see
only the brightness of My own glory.

Error may say that God can never save man from sin, if He knows and
sees it not; but God says, I am too pure to behold iniquity, and destroy
everything that is unlike Myself.
Many fancy that our heavenly Father reasons thus: If pain and sorrow
were not in My mind, I could not remedy them, and wipe the tears from
the eyes of My children. Error says you must know grief in order to
console it. Truth, God, says you oftenest console others in troubles that
you have