Editorial April 8, 1911 Issue

LIVING THE TRUTH

Archibald McLellan

We who today are the beneficiaries of the tireless labors of the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, too seldom stop to think of our own and the world's indebtedness to her. In the Preface to Science and Health (p. vii.) Mrs. Eddy says: "It is the task of the pioneer to hew the tall oak and to cut the rough granite. Future ages must declare what the pioneer has accomplished."

There is perhaps no one fact that so impresses the outsider as the wonderful spread of Christian Science in the not quite half century since its discovery, and yet this remarkable accretion of loyal followers resolves itself, after all, into a very simple matter; namely, the potent influence of a good example. It was because Mrs. Eddy lived the truth she taught, because she made Christianity practical and helpful, today and every day, and not simply a passport to a far-away heaven, that Christian Science has appealed to the world at large as a revival of the Christianity of the Master and his little band of disciples, of the "great Physician" whose loving heart yearned over those who so sorely needed to be made whole in mind and body.

It requires not only a sublime faith in the justice of one's cause, but courage of a rare degree as well, to become the pioneer in any radical departure from accepted beliefs, and time and patience and earnest effort are needed ere the path is cleared of the boulders of doubt and disbelief and the spreading branches and tangled roots of prejudice and pride. And yet, even as the "leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal," leavened the whole lump, so must all antagonism to the truth yield to "the power of an endless life," to the power of a life which exemplifies the truth that makes men free.

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