Unity of Good/Ways Higher than Our Ways
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,” that you may be allied to the Deific Power, and have the planets 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 wagonload 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 Godas 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 yet I save man from 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 put them away, and wipe the tears from the eyes of My children.” Error says: “You must know grief in order to console it.” Is this true? Do we not oftenest console others in troubles that we have outgrown? Is not our comforter always from outside and above ourselves?
God says: “I show My pity through divine law, not through human. It is My sympathy with and My knowledge of harmony (not inharmony) which alone enable Me to rebuke, and eventually destroy, every supposition of discord.”
Error says: “God must know death, in order to strike at its root;” but God saith: “I am ever-conscious Life, and thus I conquer death; for to be ever conscious of Life is to be never conscious of death. I am All. A knowledge of aught beside Myself is impossible.”
If such knowledge of evil were possible to God, it would lower His rank.
With God, knowledge is necessarily foreknowledge; and foreknowledge and foreordination must be one, in an Infinite Being. What Deity foreknows Deity must foreordain; else He is not omnipotent, and, like ourselves. He foresees events which are contrary to His creative will, yet which He can not avert.
If God knows evil at all, He must have had foreknowledge thereof; and if He foreknew it, He must virtually have intended it, or ordered it aforetime, — foreordained it; else how could it have come into the world?
But this we can not believe of God; for if the Supreme Good could predestine or foreknow evil, there would be sin in Deity, and this would be the end of Infinite Moral Unity. “If the light that is in Thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” On the contrary, evil is only a delusive deception, without any actuality which Truth can know.
