Editorial April 23, 1910 Issue

THAT HATEFUL DARNEL

John B. Willis

The parable of the tares rebukes a habit which is pitiful enough when grounded in ignorance, and which, when grounded in maliciousness, is simply despicable. It is the habit of casting into the good soil of unprotected thought that darnel of false suggestion which Christ Jesus named "the children of the wicked one," and the sower of which he named the devil. No one can read this story without being moved by a sense of the diabolical meanness of an act which thus descrates another's possession, and which fouls every foot of a field with a weed whose removal may involve years of persistent labor. The reader cannot fail to realize, furthermore, how trivial such an offense would be, upon the plane of husbandry, as compared with that of filling the receptive soil of an innocent mentality with those portrayals and intimations of evil which, when they have come to their growth, choke and hinder in human experience every good seed, and draw to their own fattening and multiplication all the better resources of human nature.

One is also likely to be reminded, as he reads this parable, of the life-long fight which he has had to wage in his efforts to escape from the blight of implantings in his own thought by those whom he called "good fellows," perchance, at the time when his ears were open to the ill-flavored stories, hints, and insinuations which they scattered in a field that was fitted for flowers and waving grain. Yet again, one may be led to think with profound regret—and this no doubt was the hope of the preacher—of his own stupid stumblings or more venial sins in this line, the part that he has taken in the sowing of tares. Surely there is no keener remorse, no sincerer repentance, than that which comes to him who in his nobler years recognizes the ill harvesting in another's life of the noxious seeds which were scattered by his careless if not wilful hand, a hand which merits, as he now knows, to his shame, the Master's uncompromising judgment, "Cut it off, and cast it from thee."

Some excuse for this sowing of darnel might be found for those whose education has brought them no clearlydefined basis of discrimination between truth and error, good and evil, and no fine ethical sense of propriety; who have become habituated in their own homes, perchance, to the abandon of gossip, the byplay of unguarded and inconsiderate comment, and who have been educated to think of a large range of materiality as an expression of divine law, and hence legitimate. But for those who through Christian Science have had abundant opportunity to acquaint themselves with the earmarks of falsity, who know the seeming tenacity of its hold, and the degradation it brings in human experience; who have been taught not only not to distribute its blight, but to resist its every appeal for place in thought,—for carelessness upon the part of these, there is no shadow of excuse, no possible palliation of the offense. Says our Leader, "Man's rights are invaded when the divine order is interfered with, and the mental trespasser incurs the divine penalty due this crime" (Science and Health, p. 106). When we recognize and honor the law of non-trespass in Christ, we are equally guarded respecting both the seeds we drop into the soil of another's thought and those we consent to have dropped in our own. The tongue that is inconsiderate of its speech, and the ear that is hospitable to the suggestions of error,—these two are confederates, and pronounced enemies of our spiritual good.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Letters

LETTERS TO OUR LEADER