Editorial December 11, 1909 Issue

SILENT EFFECTIVENESS

John B. Willis

One of the most lasting impressions gained from a visit to any great industrial mart is that of the racket and roar which characterizes human mechanism and movement, even at its best. The clatter and clang of a manufacturing plant has come to be accepted as an inseparable incident of the bringing of things to pass, and for the reason that we have grown into the belief that nothing can be done without that friction which tells of a waste of energy.

And yet even the material universe witnesses to the silent working of the greater forces. When one goes out under the stars, and looking up at the planets undertakes to compass in thought the vastness of the worlds which are so silently speeding upon their courses, there comes to him a new and awe-inspiring sense of the silent effectiveness of the forces which give impulse to these mighty orbs, while holding them in safest leash. So, too, when wandering among the giants of Mariposa, overwhelmed with the tremendous height and bigness of the trees about him, one's wonder is yet increased when he remembers that these towering trunks have all been lifted into the air by attractions which have accomplished this stupendous result without marring the stillness of an evening's hush. The electric train which thunders by our door tells of miracles being wrought for us today which would have simply astounded our immediate forbears, and yet the one impelling fact which makes possible all this wonderful phenomena is neither more nor less than the silent pull of the magnet upon its armature. Without either strain or frictional reaction, it speaks, and the work is done.

All these illustrations may direct attention to a tremendous fact which through Christian Science is determining human thought today as never before, namely, "the unlabored motion of the divine energy" (Science and Health p. 445). One of the most striking things respecting our Lord's mighty achievements was the ease, the quiet, with which they were done; and yet this becomes perfectly explicable when we remember that his works were the natural manifestation of Spirit. Belief in matter has involved humanity in the paradoxical situation of dependence upon friction, that which wastes and retards force, in order to profit by force; and when the thrall of this belief in materiality is escaped from, when we begin to realize that all real accomplishment is effected precisely as light dispels darkness, that it is simply the conquest and effacement of error by Truth,—then the material sense of the naturalness and necessity of friction, with all its noise and breakdown, loses its hold upon us, and we begin to recognize, if we do not yet understand, something of the silent effectiveness of right ideas, the forces of Spirit.

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