world of divided powers and warring forces and
unfinished enterprises, that God has something better for His children
toward which we are being led through the discipline of experience and
that we may therefore seek to conceive and affirm this ideal order and
become its citizens in body, mind and soul, she would have escaped a
perfect web of contradiction and been in line not only with the great
philosophies but with historic Christian faith. But then Christian
Science would not be Christian Science.]

_The Inescapable Reality of Shadowed Experience_

Evil does not cease to be because it is denied. The acceptance of sense
testimony is just as necessary in the region of pain and sickness as in
driving a motorcar down a crowded street and the hypothesis of a
misleading mortal mind, instead of explaining everything, demands itself
an explanation. What Mrs. Eddy calls mortal mind is only the registry of
the dearly bought experience of the race. We began only with the power
to feel, to struggle, to will and to think. We have been blind enough
and stupid enough but we are, after all, not unteachable and out of our
experience and our reflections we have created the whole splendid and
dependable body of human knowledge. What we know about pain is itself
the outcome of all the suffering of our kind. We began with no developed
philosophy nor any presuppositions about anything. Experience reflects
encompassing realities which we are able to escape only as we make their
laws our ministers. We did not give fire the power to burn, we
discovered that only in the school of the touch of flame. We did not
give edged steel the power to cut, we found that out through death and
bleeding wounds. We did not give to poisons their deadly power, our
attitude toward them is simply the outcome of our experience with them.

Conditioned as we are by those laws and forces with which this present
existence of ours is in innumerable ways inextricably interwoven, our
tested and sifted beliefs are only the outcome of an action and
interaction of recipient or creative personality upon its environment
old as human consciousness, and if in all this we have become persuaded
of pain and suffering and shadowed experience, it is only because these
are as real as any elements in experience can possibly be. To attempt
to write them out or deny them out or juggle them out in any kind of way
save in bravely meeting them and humbly being taught by them and in the