Editorial June 15, 1907 Issue

RACIAL UNITY

John B. Willis

Many good people have tried to explain the injustice of so-called natural law, the cruel wrongs inflicted upon the innocent and well-deserving, by declaring that they are a necessary incident of racial unity. They remind us that "no man liveth unto himself," and that by virtue of his identification with the race every one is subject to the disabilities which have grown out of the stumblings and sins of the race. They further declare that these ills are beneficent, as a whole, since they give warning of the violation of law, and thus point the way to racial advance. Said one recently, "Our fathers have consented to the felling of the forests, the denuding of the great watersheds, and when our rivers leap their banks and flood the country with destruction and distress we make a great outcry against the cruelty of natural law! When men have learned wisdom these things will be righted, and not till then."

This sounds very plausible. It recognizes the undeniable fact of human short-sightedness and mistake, and it seems, moreover, to offer a reasonable explanation of the multiplication of evil through heredity, contagion, etc., and is constantly referred to in that connection. A very little thought, however, will disclose the fallacy of the whole contention, that it is but a recast of the long-honored but now unacceptable creedal dictum, that "in Adam's fall we sinned all."

The fact in human history of a kind of racial unity which has begotten unmerited miseries cannot be disputed, nor the further fact that these tragedies give sure indication of somebody's unwise thought and conduct, but to conclude therefrom that such racial unity is legitimate is altogether unwarranted. The real question at issue is this: Is that ordering of human life which necessarily involves the punishment of the innocent for the guilty a divine provision? In answer to this question Christian Science declares that the belief of racial unity which brings about such results is unjust, that it cannot be of God, and hence that it is without place or power save in the realm of false sense.

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