Article March 12, 1921 Issue

"Prints of Praise"

HARRIET BRADFORD

It is related that William Prynne, the English Puritan, had his cheeks branded "S.L.," Seditious Libeler, for terming indulgence in certain amusements immoral. But refusing the interpretation attaching to the torture, Prynne replaced it with one of his own, Stigmata Laudis, "Prints of Praise," and no doubt had balm for his wounds therefrom. Now Prynne's views may have been right or they may have been wrong; at least they were sprung of the stanch morality of his Puritan heart, sincere if sometimes inflexible and shortsighted. At any rate, his view of the question has of itself no more consequence than has any human view except in so far as, transformed by spiritual understanding, it aligns itself with the fact of Principle. What is important, however, is Prynne's grasp of the fact that he could turn his mourning into praise, refuse to suffer as a result of persecution, and thus rout his would-be enemies. For, what was an enemy for if not to produce the fiction of suffering? Let the torturer wield his iron; let the letters stand out upon his cheek so clear that he who ran might read; yet their imputed significance could never be the real intent of the deed that provoked the torture. In other words, the human mind can never turn good into evil merely by calling it evil. If it could, the lie about any situation would be more powerful than the truth, and the absurdity of such a belief, carried to its logical conclusions in the daily round of living, even the man in the street, who is not overconcerned about logic, can recognize at a glance.

Now Prynne himself was perhaps not much bothered about logical thinking, but, good Puritan that he was, he was immensely concerned with the letter of the Scriptures, and consciously or otherwise, he had made his own the words of the psalmist, "Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee." The "wrath" of his day might brand Prynne a libeler, but to him, guileless of malicious intent and seeking to do good in the light of the Scriptures as he understood them, brands were but "prints of praise," an indication that he was glorifying God.

The friendlessness and isolation of the Puritans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their apparent ostracism and persecution, were not peculiar to their time. The disciples of Jesus and the apostles had the same experience, for which their Master had prepared them when he preached to the multitudes on the mount: "Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven." And since the Puritans, every seeker for Truth has met the persecution of the one evil for Truth's idea wherever and however manifest. It was not, then, the experience of the Puritans that makes them unique; rather was it the way they faced it, the bleakness of their thought. Cold and keen, rigid and rigorous, was their adherence to the letter of the Scriptures. Without the light and warmth of the spiritual understanding which, three centuries later, Mary Baker Eddy turned upon the Bible in her book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," they knew not how to "rejoice, and be exceeding glad." They attempted to glory in the suffering attendant on persecution, instead of in the fact of the powerlessness of suffering to affect the man in God's image and likeness. In other words, they acknowledged enemies, and had them in abundance. They saw about them the world divided into themselves, on the road to the kingdom, and the others, who, because of mistaken doctrine and worldliness were cut off therefrom; and when a man sees his neighbor as out of the kingdom of heaven he is likely to see the opposite of good, and thus he makes for himself the only enemy there is. Had the Puritan been imbued with that love for his neighbor which is the requirement of the second great commandment of Christ Jesus, he would have demonstrated the truth of Mrs. Eddy's statement in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 9): "'Love thine enemies' is identical with 'Thou hast no enemies.' Wherein is this conclusion relative to those who have hated thee without a cause? Simply, in that those unfortunate individuals are virtually thy best friends. Primarily and ultimately, they are doing thee good far beyond the present sense which thou canst entertain of good."

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