Editorial September 2, 1911 Issue

AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE

John B. Willis

SHE was a very bright old lady, and for more than four score years she had lived a life of devotion to the fulfilment of her highest concept of Christian faith and duty. Her gentleness, unselfishness, and goodness were proverbial, and they had greatly endeared her to one who coveted for her exaltation of sense and uplift of heart, that triumph and joy which was outlined by St. Paul when he declared that "though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day;" which speaks for true Christian freedom and which alone comports with Christian maturity. In his calls upon her, however, this friend usually found her submerged in that self-identification with the material body which has fettered so many saints, but which is so unequivocally rebuked in the teaching of Christian Science.

From the human point of view she was perfectly normal, but at the time when her sky should have been all aglow with the splendors of light, she seemed to think of little save darkness and decay. Instead of that rejoicing in conscious spiritual strength and growth which the apostle refers to as the natural as well as the fitting fruitage of faith in Christ, she was simply wedded to weakness, persistently dwelling upon the failure of sight and hearing and memory, her inability to walk or work, and her general sense of good-for-nothingness. These things were were enumerated and enlarged upon until one's heart was moved with a deep sense of the pitifulness of it all, and of the unspeakable wrong which materialistic teaching had wrought in thus Iinking life, in her thought, to the frailties of the flesh. As a minister's wife she had been a close student of the Scriptures and could quote them ad libitum, nevertheless she had acquired very little spiritual vision, gained very little of the freedom which Christ Jesus declared should attend the knowing of truth, and realized very little of that inheritance guaranteed to every faithful disciple in his wondrous words, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

The Christ-life surely means liberty, that liberty which the apostle was definitely seeking when in the agony of his struggle he cried out, "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Paul realized that absorption in and subjection to the material sense of life should be done away, and this is the very kernel of the redemptive truth which Christ Jesus taught and demonstrated, as it is the definite goal of every true Christian Scientist.

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