Article January 13, 1912 Issue

DOING GOOD WITHOUT LOSING GOOD

REV. WILLIAM P. MC KENZIE.

The doing of good ought certainly to have results beneficent to the doer, even as the labor of the sower makes more certain to him a share in the harvest. If no one were to sow, there would be no harvest. If many sow, there will be the more to reap. As a matter of custom, whenever spring days come, the sowers in the morning sow their seed and continue their toil until the dusk of evening, for the time is short, and no one knows which crop is to be sparse and which bountiful. Each worker hopes, however, that his work will have abundant reward. Yet people do not look upon doing good as if it were the sowing of seed from which results would inevitably come.

Should there be (let us only suppose it) an advocate of error, what might he urge upon those inclined to be active in the doing of good, so as to dissuade them from kindness and service to man? He would surely argue that unselfish labor is dead loss; that a man must look out for number one and let his neighbor shift for himself. Furthermore, he would argue that to give good to others is like lifting water from a cistern that soon will be emptied, leaving the owner to thirst unsupplied. And he would falsely forecast suffering, weariness, and collapse through exhaustion, for any one who in loving his neighbor should minister to his needs, tend him in sickness, or watch with him through some long night of sorrow. To the immature mind these arguments might seem to be weighty, and might superinduce a reluctance to be unselfish, liberal, neighborly. But wise men and women down the ages have ever disregarded them, and persisting in their kind and beneficent activities have found it in every way true that "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

The time has come when all men may know the falsity of that customary thinking which links hardship with the doing of good. Too long have men associated the Christian life with deprivation, and believed that to follow Christ meant to deny one's self all good in life,—all spontaneous joy, all merriment, all prosperity. The Master said: "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." His legacy was peace. He declared, "Your joy no man taketh from you." Christian Science teaches us so to understand life that we enjoy the good of it while we demonstrate its good for others. As a science it reveals the Principle, or source, of all good. If a man is working to unfold eternal truth, what blesses others blesses him first. If a man is making channels so that living waters may reach others, his own life is refreshed first.

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