Editorial June 18, 1910 Issue

"WHY THIS WASTE?"

John B. Willis

"I have all respect for the Christian Science movement, and unhesitatingly accept the fact that it is accomplishing great good, but I cannot understand why you turn down and discard the products of scientific investigation; as for instance when you treat materia medica as of no value. Why this waste of knowledge which has been acquired by such faithful and long-continued effort?" The speaker was a representative of that large body of intelligent and earnest Christian people who, as the result of educational bias, are entertaining a point of view that will not bear analysis and that has the effect of indefinitely prolonging their subjection to a false sense. Their position is not only illogical in that it begs the main question, but it involves a thought concerning "waste" which is wholly misleading.

The passing of any product of human effort, whether material or mental, may awaken a sense of loss until it is perceived that progress in any line of human interest necessarily demands the doing away with anything and everything which hinders the acceptance and rule of an improved belief. Every reformatory legislative enactment closes with a paragraph which annuls all previous enactments which may interfere with the enforcement of its provisions. The same requirement obtains in all educational advance, and today the publicist, the physicist, or the philosopher who would refuse to pursue a given line of investigation lest it compel him to give up long-accepted theories, would find it impossible to escape classification as either a fool or a fraud.

Thinking of these things, one cannot fail to see that the most serious and eventful "waste" is that which attends the disposition to cling to the methods and beliefs of the past, a disposition which fathered the saying, "What was good enough for my father is good enough for me." Such people may have many good traits, but they are certainly both unprogressive and wantonly wasteful—wasteful of the most precious possible possessions, namely, of their opportunities for growth and of all the gains that attend alert responsiveness to every call to higher and better things. Speaking of this, Mrs. Eddy has said, "Willingness to become as a little child and to leave the old for the new, renders thought receptive of the advanced idea" (Science and Health, p. 323).

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