The Faust Legend

Found among Joe’s Collection of Papers.

Joe’s comments of Mrs. Eddy’s article are printed at the end of the Journal Article.

Christian Science Journal

Volume 5, March, 1888 – page 639

THE FAUST LEGEND.

The recent superb production in our cities of an English version of Goethe’s tragedy, by Henry Irving, the London actor, sets people to looking up the great German poem,-if not in the original, then in the metrical translations, by Rev. Charles T. Brooks and Bayard Taylor, or the prose translation by Hayward.

How that story enters into the heart of mankind,-because it symbolizes human experience.

Faust has spent a life in study; but worldly wisdom satisfies him not. His age is only in thought; so when his tempting idea comes, symbolized by the red-clad Mephistopheles, Faust’s straightway becomes young, and seeks youthful pleasures. His intense selfishness leads to the ruin of Margaret, and involves the murder of her mother, brother, and babe. There are compunctions in his heart; but when at last he bids Satan get behind him, Satan declines to do so. He has his prey, and is bound to hold him. Why? Because Faust holds to evil thought.

Margaret cries to God, climbs to the Cross, lifts herself into the eternal thought of divine daughterhood and motherhood, and the power of evil is loosed. For her, it is as if there had been no evil; only she has been chastened and humiliated by her belief therein.

And Faust! Is he satisfied with his own worldly way? Far from it! He sees the kingdoms of Passion yield to his inroads, but they become mist to his vision. He bites the fruit, but finds it ashes.

What means all this? That man’s Life is not in the things he possesseth; that punishment and reward are within; that (in the language of Prophetic Scripture) when the unrighteous forsakes his thoughts of evil, God will abundantly pardon,-nay, that there will no longer be need of pardon, for the pardon, the forgiveness, the freeing, are in release from sin, not merely blessings to come after that release. Mephistopheles is unreal, a figment of fiction. So is all evil. The Angels are Margaret’s good thoughts. Faust, the man material, can not be saved until he forgets the flesh, and becomes the man spiritual. As a mirror, warped and dull, failing to reflect the divine image, he falls into Hell. Only by so adjusting himself as to focus and reflect once more the heavenly rays, can he be the true man,-the man of God, because he is the man from God.

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(This article is unsigned, and is not reprinted in Mrs. Eddy’s published works. Its style is obviously and totally Mrs. Eddy-being unsigned only emphasizes the style, its wonder, the directness, the grace, its absolute Science and scientific awareness. This impersonalizing of evil frees Margaret from murderous effort, the evil as negative disappears into God’s negative of chastity and humility; Faust is held by Principle in Hell, with the angels of God’s mercy ever awaiting his mirror to focus God, reflect the heavenly rays. The good is immediate with the right knowing!)

This is really excellent instruction by Mrs. Eddy. -JEJ

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