Editorial November 26, 1904 Issue

Humanity's Hunger

There's a big and blessed promise of humanity's redemption in the universal desire of honest men to get at the truth of things. Selfishness, the self-satisfaction of ignorance, and the prejudices of a narrowing education, always hamper and sometimes seemingly enslave the truth-loving instinct and quest, but it will not down, and in every age, as in every individual life, it ultimately claims its own and enters that protest against dogma and conventionalism which lights the torch of progress.

Every age of possible reform has been characterized by that disregard of tradition and of the opinion of others which marks the supremacy of the man, his emergence from the indifferent level of creedal loyalty. This superiority to the faith of the fathers, contains no element of disrespect for that faith, though often so charged. In all sincere men it is rather a conscious and purposeful endeavor to measure up to precisely the same standard of loyalty to conviction which has led all Christian reformers to break with the dominating thought of their times. Said a loyal Christian Scientist recently, "I was never so good a Wesleyan as I am now, and this for the reason that I was never so Wesley-like in my willingness to be misjudged and condemned by others, rather than be untrue to my highest spiritual concepts."

The assertion of this spirit of daring for truth's sake is very pronounced to-day, and while it can but shock and alarm those who identify spiritual truth with some human attempt at its statement, it is a sign of better things to all those who apprehend the place and necessity for error's uncovering in the order of our spiritual advance.

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