sorrow of our troubled world.

But Christian Science parts company soon enough with this great
fellowship 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 God not by their passing phases but
by their outcome in the wealth and worth of character.

Robert Browning sang this sturdily through a long generation riding down
its difficulties by the sheer force of an unconquerable optimism and
subduing argument to lyric passion.

"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 he