Article June 22, 1899 Issue

Henry Jewett's Opinions

Boston Evening Transcript

Mr. Henry Jewett is well known in this city as an earnest Christian Scientist. In reply to many queries as to how the play of "The Christian and the character of John Storm appeal to him as a Christian Scientist, he has written the following:—

To me, as a Christian Scientist, the most interesting feature of the play is the struggle for a higher ideal portrayed in the character of John Storm. John Storm is, to me, a modern John the Baptist, or a child crying for the light and as yet "with no language but a cry." From a Christian Science standpoint his methods at reform are crude and often fanatical, but his motives are pure and his struggles honest and unselfish. His capacity to love is great. I do not mean his passion for Glory, although even in his love for her he expresses a higher and nobler sense than the ordinary love of a man for a woman. The dominating note through it all is to save her from herself, not to get her for himself. Glory indicates the nature of his love for her in Act III., just after Drake's exit, when she says, "There is another sort of man altogether, one whose love has the reverence of a religion in it, who is ready to trample all the world under his feet for you and ask nothing in return."

But, apart from his interest in Glory, notice the thought of unselfish love given by him in the prologue: "What the world wants now is not so much the saint or yet the statesman as the Christian soldier and apostle, the man who is ready to do the hand-to-hand fighting with the world's sin and sorrow. its wretchedness and woe, to go down into the streets and slums for the beaten and broken of our bewildered cities, and to rescue them and to comfort them wherever they are, however low they have fallen. because they are his brothers and his sisters and he loves them." And then, in Act II., to Archdeacon Wealthy he says, "If God is our Father, all men are our brothers and all women are our sisters;" and to Polly, "The highest love is the love that thinks of itself last." His love certainly aims for that, and he is ready to sacrifice all that is dear to him in the world. A higher and more advanced thought is shown when he rejects the offers held out to him by the archdeacon, and in his rejection of the impractical life of a monastery, when he says to Glory in Act 1., "The life was not for me. ... I longed for work—active, earnest work; I could not live without it." He refuses a theoretical religion and strives to make his Christianity practical, as he says again to the archdeacon. "To apply Christianity to the practical life of our own time. This is very much in line with Christian Science thought, as is also his attitude in the last act, when in return for his toil and self-sacrifice he meets with ingratitude and hate from those for whom the sacrifice was made. Then he shows the purity of his love when he stands unshaken amid the seeming ruin of his hopes and plans, determined to rescue these very people and to love them still, in spite of all. Most of all, the Christian Science thought is expressed in his reply to Father Lamplugh in the same act: "What is Life if a lie can drive you out of it? No lie ever has, ever can, injure any man long. It may seem to do so, but the Truth alone can live." In these words is acknowledged the allness of God. Good; for in Christian Science Truth is synonymous with God, and the allness of God is the basic principle of Christian Science.

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