Article March 23, 1899 Issue

An Imperious Demand

BY HON. JOSEPH R. CLARKSON

Sweetly and quietly, yet with imperious demand that it take the place of all else, Christian Science came to me. I had never been truly happy. The world had failed to afford a hope of any good end. Bauble after bauble had been captured only to become nothing. I was weary of the chase after the illusive. I wanted some place to land, some place where I could moor.

For nineteen years, with the exception of a short service as judge, I had been a lawyer in active practice. Practice of law brought no content. Judgeship brought no content. Judgeship resigned and practice resumed brought no content. Opportunity for political honors was not worth seizing. Amusements, except of an out-door, manly, kind were stale. Folly, sin, what might be called mild forms of dissipation and their accompaniments—cigars, tobacco, intoxicating drinks,—enhanced rather than lessened the abiding discontent with self and what self did. Something was needed. I did not know what could yield aid.

At an early age I became a communicant in the Episcopal Church, but for twenty years had scarcely entered its doors. While an attendant, and afterward, I had seen or learned nothing which led me to think that the lives of the church members were essentially better or happier than mine, or that their God gave them as much comfort as did the world, or that they preferred their God to the world, or that they meant a tenth part of what they professed. In short, to me, the ceremony, pomp, ritual, vestments, the wordy Sunday prayers and sermons, the never-ending for raising money, the avowed love for God, and the actual love for about everything unlike God, were a travesty upon religion, a conventional sham of which I did not care to be a part.

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