Editorial October 3, 1914 Issue

"Alive unto God"

John B. Willis

Men are sometimes well worthy of study when they express as their own conviction what in fact is but the reflection of an inherited mental attitude, the resultant of centuries of teaching. Like the scurrying straw, such a man is chiefly interesting for what he indicates, and not for what he is. He registers the direction of a world-enswathing current, of which he is perhaps quite unconscious but to which he is wholly subject.

This is most notably true with respect to those temperamental impulses and religious predispositions which Christian Science not infrequently incites into exhibition. How often does the convincing evidence appear that in his statements a given person is not expressing an intelligently acquired judgement, or even an intentionally fair interpretative opinion, but only putting into circulation a mental inheritance that was laid up for him, perchance, by some centuries-old mistake of human sense! In such an event it is seen that a man is not himself, not an individual, not the manifestation of thought, but only an index of the rule of a hoary belief. He may count himself to be intelligent, liberal, and self-governing; declare boastingly, maybe, that he pays tribute to no man, while in fact he is mere echo, an unknowing exponent of a long forgotten contention.

This was illustrated recently in the remark of a cultured but willingly ignorant clerical critic of Christian Science, who after giving various other reasons for his antagonism said, "Name a single D.D. or man of large mind who has accepted Christian Science, a man who commands the world's attention." It was an expression of the pose of the contented religious culture of all history, and it was very adequately answered more than eighteen hundred years ago, when St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? ... not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty not many noble, are called: but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; ... and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are."

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