Article January 26, 1907 Issue

SELF OR SCIENCE

GEORGE H. MOORE.

In response to an evangel so comprehensive as that of Christian Science, offering cure for every human ill whatever its kind, it is natural that men should ask relief first of all for their most insistent need ; that the sick should seek health, the maimed to be made whole, the mentally discomfited for wisdom and comfort, and the sinner to find pardon. This is indeed the purpose and fruitage of true law, that our woes should turn us back from lawlessness and its calamities to invoke the control of law and its resultant harmony. To this extent our first steps in Christian Science are selfish. We seek its good for ourselves primarily, because we are weary of the husks of material life, and must have health and peace in order to work well, or to work at all, for ourselves or for others.

Our next step is greater than the first, if thereby we perceive that all healing in Christian Science is but incidental to a larger purpose ; that the coming of the Christ to us, as at the first, is primarily to establish righteousness on the earth and health as a result and reward of rightness. Learning this lesson, we for the first time approach the crisis of our faith, in that, having attained healing for ourselves, we must then rise above self through readjustment of our desires to the divine point of view, thus bringing them into accord with the larger purpose of God.

The crime of Constantine in the third century was that "having tired of fighting Christianity, he decided to use it,"—to appropriate it as an instrument of state, to serve his own selfish end. The lesson of his mistake has tremendous import to-day. The world is tired of fighting against God, is sick of its desperate straits, is nauseated with its drugs and its dregs of life, and signs of capitulation are frequent. Unnumbered people eagerly crave the fruitage of Christian Science, though as yet unwilling to render due honor to her whose insight and effort have brought this fruitage to harvest, and though as yet they refuse to accept the message sent in the way of God's own sending. The Cause of Truth, when perceived as such, should command instant allegiance in an honest thought, and the question is therefore inevitable, what should be the next step, and what our part in it? Every such question propounded by Truth is urgent, in that it must be answered not only by us as individuals, but by every tribe and nation as well.

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