Editorial January 27, 1906 Issue

"Do thyself no harm."

John B. Willis

St. Paul's earnest and assuring appeal to the Philippian jailer saved him from an impulse which might have led to a tragedy, and to-day those who are believing in the false claims of a crucial human experience, who are giving it power and are thus tempted to make their escape by a criminal act, need also the same kind and staying word of wisdom and brotherliness. It is the false assertion of mortal sense that it can lead its votaries to dreadful deeds, and Christian work is still very largely one of rescue from this falsity. If the poor are to have the gospel preached to them, and the sick are to be healed, those who to their human sense are defeated and desperate are also to have a loving hand extended, the illuming light of Truth turned upon their way.

None will question that the larger and nobler the sense of life which men entertain, the less possible every phase of disobedience to the sixth commandment becomes. If one identifies his life with the body so far as to think that its conditions determine his happiness as well as his misery, then, when peace and joy seem to have hopelessly gone, error may further prompt him to end discomfort by smiting its accredited source; but no one would be likely to yield to the temptation if he knew that his material body had no causal or determinative relation to life. The one unendurable thing, in human experience, is a false, cruel, and self-destructive mentality or mortal sense, and the folly of undertaking to remedy a recognized mental ill by doctoring or destroying a material body, is apparent to all save those who are controlled by the false belief that life is in matter and subject to it. It is manifest, therefore, that the fundamental need of the distracted and desperate is a right thought of life, the understanding that it is not related to or dependent upon matter, but is the manifestation of omnipresent Spirit, and hence wholly spiritual; and this inspiring and redemptive truth Christian Science is bringing to all the world, through the study of its text-book, Science and Health. Wherever its teaching is received, it dispels the false sense which so often leads to crime, as surely and speedily as the light of day banishes the darkness of night.

Christian ministers and teachers are coming to see the seriousness of the condition of public thought, and many of them are ready to concede that the theological teaching which confirms, if it does not awaken, the belief of life in matter must be held responsible for the ills which this belief logically entails. In accepting the story of man's creation from dust.—the teaching that he is constituted of both spirit and matter, and comes into being as the result of animal impulse,—and in looking to matter instead of Mind for the correction of human ills, the habit of identifying life with materiality is certainly begotten and nourished. More than this, even Christian thought is permeated with the idea that somehow we escape from human ills by death. This is an inference from the false teachings that matter is real, the legitimate source of the appetites and impulses which largely dominate the human mentality, and this also conduces, no doubt, to the willingness to get out of the world.

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