"The suppositional world" JOHN ELLIS SEDMAN          Christian Science is freeing the race from its belief in and fear of evil by making plain the truth that evil is never actual but always suppositional. The existence of any fact renders impossible the actual existence of anything which denies or opposes that fact. "God, good, being ever present," writes Mrs. Eddy on page 72 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," "it follows in divine logic that evil, the suppositional opposite of good, is never present."          The knowledge of any fact precludes the entertainment in thought of an opposing falsehood as if it were a fact. The mathematician cannot believe false suppositions which contradict the truths he understands. Because God is the all-knowing divine Mind, to Him there can be no realm of supposition or belief. The so-called human mind, however, because of its ignorance, is prone to conjecture, to make suppositions, and then promptly to forget that these suppositions are not ascertained facts. This tendency of the human mind is illustrated by a well-known incident in the life of a great statesman. Wishing to enable a group of men to see that they were urging upon him a certain course of action only because they were reasoning from false assumptions, he begged leave to put an apparently irrelevant question, and then asked, "How many legs has a sheep?" "Four," someone answered. "Yes," said the statesman, "and now suppose we call his tail a leg, — then how many legs has he?" Instantly came the answer, "Five." "Why, no," said the statesman; "calling a sheep's tail a leg will never make it so, and the sheep has four legs as before."          When humanity no longer mistakes fiction for fact, its troubles will disappear, for they all come from this tendency of the human mind to form and fear false human concepts. For centuries the race dared not move about with perfect freedom on the earth, because it had conjectured that the earth was flat, and then naturally reasoned that it was possible to fall over the edge. Ignorant of the nature and character of God and reasoning from its own cruel standpoint, the human mind conjured up the picture of a God of wrath, and then trembled in the presence of its own misconception.          Through many centuries mankind generally was convinced that ghosts and witches were actual realities; and in Shakespeare's day no play was complete unless it numbered among its characters a ghost, or a witch or two. Historians who were widely read at that period had soberly recorded the conduct of ghosts on certain momentous occasions; and students in the universities were solemnly taught what to say when addressing a ghost in order not to come under the malign influence of one who was hostile, nor yet to make the equally serious blunder of offending one who was friendly and who might have something of supreme importance to communicate. Hence when the ghost appears to the three watchers in Hamlet, Marcellus exclaims to the student fresh from Wittenberg, "Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio." Ghosts and witches have had their day and passed. But microbes still occupy a place in popular thought; and within recent years more than one man has been puzzled to see how he might protect himself from the vicious microbes which came to do him harm, and yet avoid hurting the friendly microbes which (according to medical theory) aid digestion.          The dream about ghosts and witches began to break and disappear when it began to dawn upon human thought that no such creatures had ever existed as actualities in God's universe, and that the human race had seen only its own superstitious beliefs objectified, just as a man in delirium sees objects which terrify him because of the state in which he finds himself as the result of his efforts to find happiness by trusting in evil; the people about him do not see what he sees, of' course, because they are not believing what he believes. While it is difficult for the average man to admit that all his troubles are of the same nature as those of the man who believed himself the victim of ghosts or witches, yet that is exactly the case, and is just what Christ Jesus' taught and proved. When the great Master said, "If ye continue in my word, . . . ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," he certainly meant that the truth which he was revealing would set the race free from all its woes. He also certainly meant that all those woes are illusions and not facts; for all the truth which a man might learn could never set him free from a single fact.          When Mrs. Eddy first told this age that sin, sickness, and death are a dream, her declarations were greeted with scorn and derision; yet she said only what the Master had said centuries before, and she met the same ridicule and opposition which had greeted his statements. When Jesus entered the house where the daughter of Jairus was supposed to lie dead, and said to the people who had gathered there to mourn, "The maid is not dead, but sleepeth," the gospel records that "they laughed him to scorn." Jesus, however, proved the correctness of his statement — proved that they were dwelling in the realm of false supposition or dreamland, and that he was thinking from the standpoint of actuality when he spoke to the maiden and she immediately responded. Only a living and present being can respond to a spoken statement. We have probably all had the experience of calling to a sleeping person and seeing him awake in response.          When Jesus said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away," he clearly meant that all which goes to make up a supposititious realm, the realm of human conjecture and belief, will pass away as men become acquainted with the divine facts, but that his words will never pass away, because he understood the truth and proclaimed eternal facts. When John bore witness to the wonderful vision which came to him on the island of Patmos and said, "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away," he recorded his revelation of the exalted state of consciousness in which he beheld the real universe. He saw the heaven and the earth which God creates, the only heaven and earth there really is or ever can be; and the old or false sense of heaven and earth had disappeared, because he was not at that moment entertaining in thought any false suppositions.          The problem which confronts the human race may, then, be stated in this way: each individual must learn, in the way that Christian Science teaches, to lay aside one by one all false suppositions about God, man, and the universe; to accept one by one the divine facts, and thus come into the enjoyment of the eternal good which exists here and now, which has no opposite. On page 167 of "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany," Mrs. Eddy writes: "The suppositional world within us separates us from the spiritual world, which is apart from matter, and unites us to one another. Spirit teaches us to resign what we are not and to understand what we are in the unity of Spirit — in that Love which is faithful, an ever-present help in trouble, which never deserts us."   "'The suppositional world'" by John Ellis Sedman The Christian Science Journal, November, 1918

 

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